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DUTCH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

gouw.

shire, geographical and/or administrative region

4 characters1 syllables approx.Nederlands language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɣɑu̯/
  1. shire, geographical and/or administrative region

    archaic · feminine · historical
    in de Dietse gouwen
  2. shire, geographical and/or administrative region gau (subdivision of the Frankish and Holy Roman empires)

    Middle-Ages · archaic · feminine · historical
  3. shire, geographical and/or administrative region gau (subdivision of the NSDAP and later the Third Reich)

    Nazism · archaic · feminine · historical
Where this word comes from

From Middle Dutch gou, gau, gō (genitive gooy), from Old Dutch gō, from Proto-West Germanic *gawi, from Proto-Germanic *gawją, a collective form equivalent to ge- (“a prefix that indicates a single collective whole”) + ouwe (“land near water or drenched with water”). Cognate of West Frisian gea, goa, German Gau.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.