bowsy

bowsy is the obsolete spelling of boozy.

Meaning of boozy

boozy (comparative boozier, superlative booziest)

Intoxicated by alcohol.

Synonyms:

drunk
Inclined to consume a significant amount of alcohol.
- Dirty Davy had brought with him his chief clerk, who was a facetious personage, and boozy, and on the confidential footing of a common rascality with his master, who, after the fashion of Harry V. in his nonage, condescended in his frolics and his cups to men of low estate […]1863, Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard
Synonyms:

drunk, sottish
Involving a large consumption of alcohol.
- We all had hangovers after a boozy weekend in town.
Containing or cooked with alcohol.
- For dessert, the hosts treated us to a helping of boozy apple pie.
Synonyms:

alcoholic

bowsy (plural bowsies)

(Ireland, colloquial) An unsavoury and unreliable (usually male) layabout.
- —The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 1]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC
Synonyms:

gurrier, gouger, lout, scanger, ruffian

Probably from above, from being applied to drunkards.

What does bowsy mean?: Bowsy means an unsavoury and unreliable (usually male) layabout.
What is bowsy the obsolete spelling of?: Bowsy is the obsolete spelling of boozy.
What part of speech is bowsy?: Bowsy is a noun.
What is the plural of bowsy?: The plural of bowsy is bowsies.

Adapted from Wiktionary: bowsy (page history and authors); boozy (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: 2026-09-02

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