Word.ws English Dictionary

bossal

bossal is the alternative form of bossale.

Meaning of bossale

Noun

bossale (plural bossales)

  1. (historical) A black African-born enslaved person in a French (or sometimes other European) colony, especially Haiti (as opposed to a slave born in the colony).
    • In Louisiana, French colonists relied on bossales later than elsewhere as they first imposed the slavery system on Amerindians only. The first slave ship carrying Africans arrived in 1719 […]2019, Aline Helg, Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas, UNC Press Books, →ISBN, page 76
    Synonyms:
    bozal

Forms of bossal

pluralbossals

Questions about bossal

What is bossal the alternative form of?
Bossal is the alternative form of bossale.

Words near bossal in the dictionary

  1. bossa nova
  2. bossa novas
  3. bossaball
  4. bossage
  5. bossages
  6. bossal
  7. bossale
  8. bossales
  9. Bossall
  10. bossals
  11. bossanova

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bossal (page history and authors); bossale (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: “bossal.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bossal. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.