Word.ws English Dictionary

bergie

bergie noun: a homeless person in Cape Town.

Noun

bergie (plural bergies)

  1. (South Africa) A homeless person in Cape Town.
    • The man joined a group of bergies sleeping near the police station and pretended to be one of them when confronted by the rangers.
    • ‘You check my records, okay? You'll see. Always, every week, some bergie or skollies causing trouble for me. What are my customers supposed to do?’2008, Lauren Beukes, Moxyland, Jacana Media, →ISBN, page 103

Forms of bergie

pluralbergies

Origin of bergie

Borrowed from Afrikaans bergie, from berg (“mountain”). So called because they used to live in the mountains.

Questions about bergie

What does bergie mean?
Bergie means a homeless person in Cape Town.
What part of speech is bergie?
Bergie is a noun.
What is the plural of bergie?
The plural of bergie is bergies.

Words near bergie in the dictionary

  1. berghmotes
  2. Berghoff
  3. Berghoffs
  4. berghs
  5. Bergi
  6. bergie
  7. bergies
  8. Bergin
  9. Berginc
  10. berginization
  11. Bergins

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bergie (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: “bergie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bergie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.