bower means A surname. Lexicurio rates it Workaday — a strength score of 11 out of 100.
bower is pronounced /ˈbaʊə(ɹ)/.
Why “bower” is a great word
BOWER — [Noun] A shady, leafy shelter or recess in a garden or woods, or a rustic country cottage used as a retreat. From Middle English bour, from Old English būr ("dwelling, chamber"), from Proto-West Germanic *būr, from Proto-Germanic *būrą ("room, abode"). Unlike a "boudoir," which suggests an ornate interior of cultivated privacy, or an "arbor," which denotes a constructed lattice for plants, a bower is an enclave where refuge is found, not just fashioned. It is the dappled hollow beneath a willow’s weeping branches, the vine-clad cottage half-hidden at the lane’s end, and the quiet space under the lilacs where the world’s clamor grows faint—a testament to the human longing for a room of one’s own that feels less built than grown.
Etymology
From Middle English bour, from Old English būr, from Proto-West Germanic *būr, from Proto-Germanic *būrą (“room, abode”).
Cognate with Saterland Frisian Búur (“storage room, utility room; cage”), German Bauer (“birdcage”), Old Norse búr (“cage”) (Danish bur, Norwegian Bokmål bur, Swedish bur).
name
- A surname.“Snowdon climbed to the top floor of the house opposite George's in Pimlico to observe the artist in one window and his model, the painter Natalie Bower, in the adjacent.”
noun
- A bedroom or private apartments, especially for a woman in a medieval castle.“Give me my lute in bed now as I lie, / And lock the doors of mine unlucky bower.”
- A dwelling; a picturesque country cottage, especially one that is used as a retreat.“While friends arrived in circles gay,
To visit Damon's bower”
- A shady, leafy shelter or recess in a garden or woods.“[…]say that thou overheard'st us,
And bid her steal into the pleached bower,
Where honey-suckles, ripen'd by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter;[…]”
- A large structure made of grass, twigs, etc., and decorated with bright objects, used by male bower birds during courtship displays.
- A peasant; a farmer.
- Either of the two highest trumps in the card games euchre and five hundred (where the joker is omitted).“Yet the cards they were stocked / In a way that I grieve, / And my feelings were shocked / At the state of Nye's sleeve, / Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, / And the same with intent to deceive.”
verb
- To embower; to enclose.“O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell / When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend / In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?”
- To lodge.“Flora now calleth forth each flower,
And bids make readie Maias bower”