Word.ws English Dictionary

bouse

bouse verb: to haul or hoist (something) with a tackle.

Verb (1)

bouse (third-person singular simple present bouses, present participle bousing, simple past and past participle boused)

  1. To haul or hoist (something) with a tackle.

Noun

bouse (countable and uncountable, plural bouses)

  1. (obsolete) to drink, especially alcoholic drink
    • Bien Darkmans then, Bouse Mort and Ken1665, Richard Head, The English Rogue, page 46
  2. (obsolete) a carouse; a booze
    • Six-and-twenty years of prison; the first seventeen years of it strict and hard, almost of the dungeon sort; the remainder, on his fairly abdicating, was in another Castle, that of Callundborg in the Island of Zealand, 'with fine apartments and conveniences,' and even 'a good bouse of liquor now...1858, Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich II of Prussia, volume 1, Chapman and Hall, published 1873, page 192

Verb (2)

bouse (third-person singular simple present bouses, present participle bousing, simple past and past participle boused)

  1. (obsolete) To drink immoderately; to carouse; to booze.
    • you do provide me hum enough , And lour to bouse withc. 1622, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger [et al.?], “Beggars Bush”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, →OCLC, (please...

Proper noun capitalized: Bouse

Bouse (countable and uncountable, plural Bouses)

  1. A surname.
  2. A census-designated place in La Paz County, Arizona, United States, believed to be named after Thomas Bouse.

Forms of bouse

Verb
third-person singular presentbouses
present participlebousing
past participleboused
pastboused
alternative formbowse
Noun
pluralbouses
Proper noun
pluralBouses

Origin of bouse

Of unknown origin.

From Middle English bous (noun), bousen (verb), from Middle Dutch būsen, buisen, buysen (“to drink heavily”). Related to Middle High German būsen (“to swell, inblow”). More at beer.

Words formed from bouse

Questions about bouse

What does bouse mean?
Bouse means to haul or hoist (something) with a tackle.
What part of speech is bouse?
Bouse can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
What is the past tense of bouse?
The past tense of bouse is boused.

Words near bouse in the dictionary

  1. Boursiquot
  2. Boursiquots
  3. Bourton
  4. Bourton-on-the-Water
  5. Bous
  6. bouse
  7. boused
  8. bouser
  9. bousers
  10. bouses
  11. Bousfield

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bouse (page history and authors); Bouse (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:

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