What does bousy mean?
"Bousy" is an archaic English adjective meaning drunk or intoxicated with alcohol. Formed from the old verb "bouse" (or "bowse"), meaning to drink heavily, it flourished in earlier centuries — particularly in tavern culture, colloquial speech, and verse — before fading from everyday use. Today it survives chiefly in dialect, in historical writing, and in the pages of unabridged dictionaries, having been almost entirely displaced by its close relative "boozy." Because it sounds like a rustic cousin of more familiar drinking words, it can lend an antique or comic flavor to a sentence about revelry: a character in a period story might be described as bousy after a night of carousing. Readers encountering it should treat it as a colorful relic of English drinking vocabulary rather than a word in current standard use.
adjectiveDrunk; intoxicated with alcohol. Now archaic or dialectal, largely supplanted by the related word "boozy."
- Drunk; intoxicated with alcohol (now archaic or dialectal).
"He came home bousy after a night at the tavern."
"The old ballad tells of a bousy squire who could barely find his horse."
"By midnight the whole company was decidedly bousy."
"Bousy" is what you called someone drunk centuries before "boozy" took over the job — a tavern-era word that survives today mostly on dictionary pages.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of bousy
"Bousy" derives from the Middle English verb "bousen" (later "bouse" or "bowse"), meaning to drink deeply or to booze, which itself was likely borrowed from or influenced by Middle Dutch "búsen," meaning to drink excessively. The adjective simply describes someone affected by such drinking. Its modern cousin "booze" and "boozy" come from the same Germanic root, making them true relatives rather than coincidental look-alikes. The word has been largely obsolete since around the nineteenth century.
How bousy is actually used
"Bousy" belongs to historical, dialectal, or deliberately archaic register; in contemporary writing "drunk," "boozy," or "inebriated" would be the natural choices. It carries a mildly comic or rustic connotation rather than a harsh one.
Easily confused with bousy
"Boozy" is the standard modern adjective (meaning given to or characterized by drinking), while "bousy" is an older, now archaic variant essentially meaning drunk.
"Lousy" means infested with lice or, informally, of poor quality, whereas "bousy" means drunk — they merely rhyme.