Word.ws English Dictionary

bone-idle

bone-idle adjective: utterly lazy.

Adjective

bone-idle (not comparable)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, idiomatic) Utterly lazy.
    • For the last three weeks I have been going what you call bone-idle.1836, Thomas Carlyle, New Letters

bone-idle meaning in Bengali

bone-idle in Bengali

অলস

Synonyms of bone-idle

3 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of bone-idle

alternative formbone idle

Origin of bone-idle

Laziness that penetrates the very bones. Attested 1836. Similar terms (bone-lazy, bone-sore, bone-tired) pre-dated it in The Vocabulary Of East Anglia, 1830, Robert Forby. Compare to the bone.

Questions about bone-idle

What does bone-idle mean?
Bone-idle means utterly lazy.
What is bone-idle in Bengali?
Bone-idle in Bengali is অলস. See Bone-idle meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is bone-idle?
Bone-idle is an adjective.

Words near bone-idle in the dictionary

  1. bone-grubber
  2. bone-grubbers
  3. bone-hard
  4. bone-house wasp
  5. bone-house wasps
  6. bone-idle
  7. bone-in
  8. bone-jarring
  9. bone-meal
  10. bone-mouth
  11. bone-mouths

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bone-idle (page history and authors); bone-idle (Bengali Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-bone-idle.ogg.

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