Word.ws English Dictionary

bodgie

bodgie noun: a member of a 1950s rock subculture; a teddy boy.

Noun

bodgie (plural bodgies)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, slang) A member of a 1950s rock subculture; a teddy boy.
    • I comb my hair as best I can. It is in a crew-cut ordered by the chief warder. He must have read that bodgies wear their hair long and decided to do his bit in the fight against juvenile delinquency.1965, Mudrooroo, Wild Cat Falling, HarperCollins, published 2001, page 17
    • Unlike McDonald, Manning noted with dismay that traditional relations between the sexes were broken down in bodgie groups. Bodgies, he argued, were disturbed youth, hooligans, maladjusted.1993, Lesley Johnson, The Modern Girl: Girlhood and Growing Up, page 100
    Synonyms:
    greaser, rocker

Examples of bodgie in a sentence

  • The New Zealand public and press largely shared his view of bodgies as juvenile delinquents who posed a social threat.2001, Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, page 223:
  • In Toowoomba, Magistrate Kearney was up in arms over the bodgies and widgies in town – those dressed-up teenagers with their spruced hair and polka-dot dresses who loitered around the city streets.2010, William Stokes, Westbrook, page 183:

Synonyms of bodgie

Forms of bodgie

pluralbodgies

Origin of bodgie

From bodg(er) + -ie.

Questions about bodgie

What does bodgie mean?
Bodgie means a member of a 1950s rock subculture; a teddy boy.
How do you use bodgie in a sentence?
The New Zealand public and press largely shared his view of bodgies as juvenile delinquents who posed a social threat.
What part of speech is bodgie?
Bodgie is a noun.
What is the plural of bodgie?
The plural of bodgie is bodgies.

Words near bodgie in the dictionary

  1. bodged
  2. bodger
  3. bodgers
  4. bodgery
  5. bodges
  6. bodgie
  7. bodgies
  8. bodging
  9. bodgy
  10. Bodh Gaya
  11. Bodhachandra

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bodgie (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 bodgie.ogg.

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