Word.ws English Dictionary

bobby soxer

bobby soxer noun: in the 1940s, a young woman or teenage girl who was a zealous fan of traditional pop, especially of Frank Sinatra.

bobby soxer: in the 1940s, a young woman or teenage girl who was a zealous fan of traditional pop, especially of...
Image: Wystan from Ann Arbor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

bobby soxer (plural bobby soxers)

  1. (historical) In the 1940s, a young woman or teenage girl who was a zealous fan of traditional pop, especially of Frank Sinatra.
    • From my mother I’d learned that “nice” people should always frequent “nice” places, but here was Maria, certifiably nice, who relished the diner, twirled on the metal stool like a bobby-soxer, and punched out tunes on the jukebox.1988, Edmund White, chapter 1, in The Beautiful Room Is Empty, New York: Vintage International, published 1994
    • After having played both Judy Graves and Corliss Archer, Shirley Temple finally cemented her latter-day reputation as Hollywood's ultimate bobby-soxer when she starred in the only film to use the term in its title: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947).2006, Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-century Popular Culture, Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 165

Forms of bobby soxer

pluralbobby soxers
alternative formbobby-soxer
alternative formbobbysoxer

Origin of bobby soxer

From the bobby socks that they wore; bobby sox + -er.

Questions about bobby soxer

What does bobby soxer mean?
Bobby soxer means in the 1940s, a young woman or teenage girl who was a zealous fan of traditional pop, especially of Frank Sinatra.
What part of speech is bobby soxer?
Bobby soxer is a noun.
What is the plural of bobby soxer?
The plural of bobby soxer is bobby soxers.

Words near bobby soxer in the dictionary

  1. bobby pin
  2. bobby pins
  3. bobby sock
  4. bobby socks
  5. bobby sox
  6. bobby soxer
  7. bobby soxers
  8. bobby-dazzler
  9. bobby-dazzlers
  10. bobby-socked
  11. bobby-sox

Source and license

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