A Brief History of the Expression: Cowlick

A lock or tuft of hair growing in a different direction from the rest of the hair is called a cowlick. Most authorities, including the major dictionaries, agree that the reason for this expression is that the tuft looks as though a cow had licked it.

But why a cow? Why not a catlick or a doglick or a horselick? Cats, dogs, and horses like to lick, too. They lick themselves, their young, and even nearby humans.

The exact origin of the expression cowlick is buried in the linguistic past. However, there may be a hint in Norse mythology. Before the beginning of the world, the divine primeval cow Audumbla licked the cosmic salty ice blocks, and as she licked, a man’s hair appeared; when she continued to lick, the man’s head and finally the rest of his body were revealed. Thus the cow gave form to Buri, the ancestor of the gods. Notice that the first body part that the cow licked was the hair. This myth was recorded in the early 1200s (by Snorri Sturluson), but, of course, the story itself probably goes back much further in time, and it may have influenced, or reflected, the common linguistic imagery of other Europeans.

The word cowlick was in use in England by at least 1598. In that year Richard Haydocke published his English translation of a 1584 painting tract by the Italian writer G.P. Lomazzo, which contains the following passage: “The lockes or plaine feakes of haire called cow-lickes, are made turning upwards.” So the cowlick imagery was familiar in Italian as well. The passage is quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines cowlick as “a lock or curl of hair which looks as if it had been licked by a cow.

In British English slang, costermongers (people who sold food from barrows, 1500s to 1800s) used the word cowlick for a lock of hair that was greased, curled, brought forward from the ear, and plastered onto the cheek, as if licked into placed by the tongue of a cow. That sense of the word was recorded by at least the 1800s, but its street use may have started much earlier.

In dialectal British English, cowlick, also recorded by at least the 1800s, meant a lock of hair that would not lie flat on a cow’s own hide. This condition was believed to be caused by “the animal constantly licking” the hair (English Dialect Dictionary, 1898).

Early linguists in the United States recorded similar definitions. Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defined cowlick as “a tuft of hair that appears as if licked by a cow.”

Another view, proposed by some linguists, is that cowlick comes from the way that a cow eats. A cow has thirty-two teeth: eight incisors on the bottom front jaw and six molars on each side of the top and the bottom (for a total of twenty-four). But in its upper front jaw it has a pad of cartilage, not cutting teeth. To eat grass, a cow must grab a hank, twist its head, and yank off the grass. With that method of eating, a cow cannot crop as close to the ground as some other animals can. The rough pattern left by a cow’s “bite” is said by some to be the source of the figurative cowlick.

However, the history of the expression, from its incipient imagery in Norse mythology to its use in both British English (standard, slang, and dialectal) and American English, shows that it is the cow’s licking with its tongue that has brought about the figurative sense of cowlick.

(Principal sources: Oxford English Dictionary; Darryl Lyman, Dictionary of Animal Words and Phrases, Jonathan David Publishers, www.jdbooks.com)