Word.ws English Dictionary

boys' love

boys' love noun: a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters; yaoi.

Noun

boys' love (uncountable)

  1. a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters; yaoi
    Synonyms:
    BL

Synonyms of boys' love

Origin of boys' love

Phono-semantic matching of Japanese ボーイズラブ (bōizu rabu), itself a wasei eigo (和製英語; pseudo-anglicism) derived from boys + love.

Questions about boys' love

What does boys' love mean?
Boys' love means a genre of fictional media originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between male characters; yaoi.
What part of speech is boys' love?
Boys' love is a noun.

Words near boys' love in the dictionary

  1. boys will be boys
  2. boys' club
  3. boys' clubs
  4. boys' home
  5. boys' homes
  6. boys' love
  7. boys' names
  8. boys' room
  9. boys' rooms
  10. boys' toys
  11. boyscout

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boys' love (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-boys' love.oga.

Cite this entry: “boys' love.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/boys%27_love. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.