Word.ws English Dictionary

bloody noun

bloody noun noun: the bullfrog, or the sound made by it.

Noun

bloody noun (plural bloody nouns)

  1. (US, archaic, dialectal) The bullfrog, or the sound made by it.
    • "Ye little spalpeeny frog of a bog-throtting son of a bloody noun!"1850, Edgar Allan Poe, Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling
    • The big fellow was not there, but a keen-eyed little bull-frog had taken his place and he seemed to comprehend the situation at a glance. For he set up the croak, Bloody nouns, played out! played out!! PLAYED OUT!!!1868, F. O. S., of Shreveport, Louisiana, quoted in The Land We Love: A Monthly Magazine; V. 1-6; May 1866-Mar. 1869, page 165

Forms of bloody noun

pluralbloody nouns
alternative formbloody-noun
alternative formbloodynoun

Origin of bloody noun

From "blood 'n' 'oun's", from "blood and wounds". Several sources, including Harrison Garman's 1892 A Synopsis of the Reptiles and Amphibians of Illinois, say the frog is so called because "its peculiar bass notes […] have a fancied resemblance to the expression" blood and wounds and other similar-sounding and similarly imposing phrases like "be drowned".

Questions about bloody noun

What does bloody noun mean?
Bloody noun means the bullfrog, or the sound made by it.
What part of speech is bloody noun?
Bloody noun is a noun.
What is the plural of bloody noun?
The plural of bloody noun is bloody nouns.

Words near bloody noun in the dictionary

  1. bloody milk cap
  2. bloody Nora
  3. bloody Norah
  4. bloody nose
  5. bloody noses
  6. bloody noun
  7. bloody nouns
  8. bloody oath
  9. bloody show
  10. Bloody Sunday
  11. bloody sweat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bloody noun (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “bloody noun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bloody_noun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.