Word.ws English Dictionary

bomboy

bomboy noun: a native supervisor of native laborers in colonial Africa.

Noun

bomboy (plural bomboys)

  1. (historical) A native supervisor of native laborers in colonial Africa.
    • Two Bomboys to take care [while] six Labourers work in the Garden and the Stockyard. Cudjoe, the Slaves' Bomboy went with ten Women to cut & carry Wood.a. 1980, quoted in A. van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, 1980 (page 83)
    • Quey and his fellow company men’s official duties included meeting Badu and his men weekly to go over the inventory, overseeing the bomboys who loaded the canoes with cargo, and updating the Castle’s governor with news of Badu’s other trade partners.b. 2016, in Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, (chapter "Quey", page 62)

Forms of bomboy

pluralbomboys

Questions about bomboy

What does bomboy mean?
Bomboy means a native supervisor of native laborers in colonial Africa.
What part of speech is bomboy?
Bomboy is a noun.
What is the plural of bomboy?
The plural of bomboy is bomboys.

Words near bomboy in the dictionary

  1. bombora
  2. bomboras
  3. bombous
  4. Bombowlee
  5. Bombowlee Creek
  6. bomboy
  7. bomboys
  8. bombproof
  9. bombproofed
  10. bombproofing
  11. bombproofs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bomboy (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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