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gypsy

nounadjectiveverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈd͡ʒɪp.si//

An itinerant person or any person, not necessarily Romani; a tinker, a traveller or a carny.

noun

  1. 1

    An itinerant person or any person, not necessarily Romani; a tinker, a traveller or a carny.

    Like a right gypsy, hath, at fast and loose, Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.

  2. 2

    A move in contra dancing in which two dancers walk in a circle around each other while maintaining eye contact (but not touching as in a swing). (Compare whole gyp, half gyp, and gypsy meltdown, in which this step precedes a swing.)

  3. 3

    A member of a Broadway musical chorus line.

  4. 4

    datedA person with a dark complexion.

  5. 5

    datedA sly, roguish woman.

  6. 6

    datedA fortune teller.

  7. 7

    Variant of GypsyAlternative form of Gypsy (“member of the Romani people”).

    It was at this town of Badajoz, the capital of Estremadura, that I first fell in with those singular people, the Zincali, Gitanos, or Spanish gypsies.

    He championed the music of the gypsies as he did the Muslim and Jewish roots of Spanish culture. […] All these and more were fused in the forge of the gypsy experience into a singular art form, unlike any of its sources, evoking its own worldview, its own existential stance.

Etymology

See Gypsy. Compare bohemian, from Bohemia.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or having the qualities of an itinerant person or group with qualities traditionally ascribed to Romani people; making a living from dishonest practices or theft etc.

  2. 2

    Variant of GypsyAlternative form of Gypsy: of or belonging to the Rom, Dom or Lom people.

verb

  1. 1

    To roam around the country like a gypsy.

    The rest of the day is spent out of doors "Gypsying", and families greatly enjoy themselves on these occasions.

  2. 2

    To perform the gypsy step in contra dancing.

    Look at the person you're gypsying with, and convey the message that you notice them as a person and that you're glad that they're there, […]

    The only one I know of is The Tease by Tom Hinds which starts with the actives gypsying and then swinging their neighbors and ends with contra […]

Forms

plural
gypsies
past tense
gypsied
past participle
gypsied
present participle
gypsying
third person singular
gypsies
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).