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bimbo

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɪmbəʊ//
  • United States//ˈbɪmboʊ//

A physically attractive person, typically a woman or otherwise feminine in appearance, who lacks intelligence.

noun

  1. 1

    slangA physically attractive person, typically a woman or otherwise feminine in appearance, who lacks intelligence.

    Anyway, to make a long, dull story even duller, I come from a time when a guy like me used to come into a joint like this and pick up a young chick like you and… call her a ‘bimbo’.

    a. 1992, P. J. O’Rourke, a sketch A bimbo is a woman who is not pretty enough to be a model, not smart enough to be an actress, and not nice enough to be a poisonous snake.

    [Tina] Fey […] makes hay with the thought processes of a purebred bimbo: […]

  2. 2

    datedA stupid or foolish person.

    And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' type, fellows who had more or less shot their bolt after saying 'Eh, what?' and slapping their leg with a hunting crop.

    Isn't he the bimbo who took the bread out of the mouths of the Thursday Review people? Chuck the blighter out of the window and we want to see him bounce.

    Who is this bimbo, Barney? Is he a regular customer or what?

Etymology

From Italian bimbo (“a child, a male baby”), variant of bambino (“child”). Originated in Italian American theater, attested 1919, as “stupid, inconsequential man”, by 1920 developed sense of “floozie, attractive and stupid woman”. Popularized in 1920s by Jack Conway of entertainment magazine Variety, who also popularized baloney (“nonsense”) and palooka (“large stupid man”). Revived in popularity in 1980s US political sex scandals.

Forms

plural
bimbos, bimboes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).