Skip to content
OneKitly

bossy

adjectivenounadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈbɒsi//
  • United Kingdom//ˈbɒsɪ//
  • United States//ˈbɔsi//
  • //ˈbɑsi//

Tending to give orders to others, especially when unwarranted; domineering.

adjective

  1. 1

    Tending to give orders to others, especially when unwarranted; domineering.

    Over in the wardrobe department a bossy woman in ill-fitting dungarees tried to talk her into wearing a short red low-cut dress for the test.

    Cuphead is a difficult gauntlet through a ton of bosses, from evil clowns to bossy queen bees.

    Where American Jewish men contend with stereotypes of being oversexed, needy, nebbishy and neurotic (like Woody Allen, boo hiss), Jewish women are cast as withholding, bossy, exotic, and materialistic (like Fran Drescher, which honestly? Goals).

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰā- Proto-Germanic *bō-? Proto-Germanic *baswô Proto-West Germanic *baswō Old Dutch *baso Middle Dutch baes Dutch baasbor. English boss Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Germanic *-gaz Proto-West Germanic *-g Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English bossy From boss + -y.

noun

  1. 1

    datedA cow or calf.

    A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped it at the ranch for the boys to attend to.

Etymology

Diminutive of dialectal English boss + -y, as used in the term boss-calf (which, like buss-calf, is a variant form of boose-calf, a calf kept in a boose (“stall”)).

adjective

  1. 1

    Ornamented with bosses; studded.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰew-der.? Proto-Germanic *bautaną Proto-West Germanic *bautan Frankish *bottjabor. Vulgar Latin *bottia Old French bocebor. Middle English bos English boss Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Germanic *-gaz Proto-West Germanic *-g Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English bossy From boss + -y.

Forms

plural
bossies
comparative
bossier, more bossy
superlative
bossiest, most bossy
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).