Meaning & use

seel

verb·Advanced

An archaic term meaning to sew a hawk's eyelids shut temporarily as part of falconry training.

See it in a sentence

Falconers once would seel a young hawk's eyes to help it grow calm around handlers.

The old text described how trainers seeled the bird's eyelids with a fine silk thread.

A note on using this word

Seel survives almost exclusively in falconry history and older literature, including a famous line in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Words with a similar meaning

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