Word.ws English Dictionary

bamboo wife

bamboo wife noun: in East Asia and Southeast Asia, a hollow bamboo bolster roughly the size of a human body, embraced by a person while sleeping during hot weather because its open structure exposes the body to cooling air flow.

bamboo wife: in East Asia and Southeast Asia, a hollow bamboo bolster roughly the size of a human body, embraced...
Image: Thomas Albert, Ph.D, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

bamboo wife (plural bamboo wives)

  1. In East Asia and Southeast Asia, a hollow bamboo bolster roughly the size of a human body, embraced by a person while sleeping during hot weather because its open structure exposes the body to cooling air flow.
    Synonyms:
    Dutch wife

Synonyms of bamboo wife

Forms of bamboo wife

pluralbamboo wives

Origin of bamboo wife

Calque from Chinese 竹夫人 (zhúfūrén).

Questions about bamboo wife

What does bamboo wife mean?
Bamboo wife means in East Asia and Southeast Asia, a hollow bamboo bolster roughly the size of a human body, embraced by a person while sleeping during hot weather because its open structure exposes the body to cooling air flow.
What part of speech is bamboo wife?
Bamboo wife is a noun.
What is the plural of bamboo wife?
The plural of bamboo wife is bamboo wives.

Words near bamboo wife in the dictionary

  1. bamboo shoot
  2. bamboo shoots
  3. bamboo torture
  4. bamboo vine
  5. bamboo vines
  6. bamboo wife
  7. bamboo wives
  8. bamboo worm
  9. bambooed
  10. bambooes
  11. bambooey

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bamboo wife (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bamboo wife.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bamboo_wife. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.