gooey

Syllables: goo·eyUK/ˈɡuːi//ˈɡui/

gooey adjective: having the consistency of goo: soft or viscous, and sticky.

Adjective

gooey (comparative gooeyer or gooier, superlative gooeyest or gooiest)

(informal) Having the consistency of goo: soft or viscous, and sticky.
- gooey liquid covered the floor
- The cookies, soft and gooey, proved a smash hit at the party.
Synonyms:

goolike, ooey-gooey, oozy
(figuratively, informal) Emotional or sentimental, especially to an excessive extent; mushy, soppy.
- What flower has been bred in more than three thousand varieties, and become the symbol of the gooeyest human sentimentality and pampering?1956 April, H[omer] Nearing, Jr., “The Neurotic Rose”, in Leo Margulies, editor, Fantastic Universe, volume 5, number 3, New York, N.Y.: King-Size Publications, →OCLC, page 87
- Nobody goes all gooey over a character like me and talks about having half a million dollars and offers me a trip to Rio and a nice home complete with all the luxuries.1958, Raymond Chandler, Playback, 1st American edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company […], page 107
Synonyms:

maudlin, mawkish, treacly, bathetic, cheesy, squishy, corny, drippy, hokey, icky

Antonyms:

unemotional, unsentimental
(archaic, figuratively, informal) Distasteful, unpleasant.
- Mr. Hugh Dillman's Palm Beach divorce suit will be gooey, Three of his golf-playing ???? will be mentioned …1938 November 15, Walter Winchell, “On Broadway”, in Harold W. Sanford, editor, Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, N.Y.: Gannett Co., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 6, column 3
Synonyms:

abhorrant, abhorrent, bad, sickly, mean, infernal, bum, horrid, vile, demonic

Antonyms:

acceptable, agreeable, amiable, charming, comely, nice, pleasant, pleasing, welcome

Noun

gooey (plural gooeys or gooies)

(informal) A thing which is soft or viscous, and sticky.
- On impulse, Pat stopped at a bakery. […] He came out with a box full of gooies—éclairs, cream horns, Napoleons— […] and we parked outside the college grounds and ate them, yapping at each other and smearing ourselves with chocolate and cream.1964, Kit Reed, chapter II, in At War as Children […], New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Company, →OCLC, pages 17–18
- I put the "gooeys," green fluorescent snots, into Louie's nose, set up his brain, and get ready to play the game with my mom. We keep putting our fingers up Louie's nose and pulling gooeys out of it.1997, Paula Danziger, Amber Brown Sees Red (Amber Brown; 4), New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, →ISBN, page 99
(dated, derogatory, figuratively, informal) A person who is regarded as weak or worthless; a fool.
- But only a confirmed chump and irremediable ‘gooey’ comes up for a third ‘chuck.’ […] ‘Jest jollyin’ these gooeys, that’s how’, he said.1911, Edward Dyson, “Dukie M’Kenzie’s Dawnce”, in Benno and Some of the Push (Bookstall Series), Sydney, N.S.W.: N.S.W. Bookstall Company, →OCLC, page 32
Synonyms:

absolute zero, assbucket, asswipe, badling, blatherskite, bugger, carrion, cipher, cockstain, crumb
(US, figuratively, informal) A person who favours closer relationships with other people and less structured settings, rather than formal, organized settings; also, an educational approach, curriculum, etc., which is less structured.
- Planned variation was based on systematically applying different educational approaches developed by academic experts, each of whom was to become a "sponsor" of a single type of program – from highly structured classroom models, sometimes called "pricklies," to open classrooms and more exploratory...1976 February 15, Pamela Moore, “Follow Through—Biggest Social Science Study Ever …”, in Daniel S[heldon] Greenberg, editor, Science & Government Report: The Independent Bulletin of Science Policy...
- Alan Watts says that these two types may be named the "prickly" people and the "gooey" people. The pricklies, he says, the Marthas, are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise and like to stress differences and divisions between things. The gooeys, the Marys, are tender-minded romanticists who love...1979, Robert C. Wright, “Reminiscing and Romancing in Mid-America: Rumes, Romances, Stories, and Poems”, in Frederick Manfred, Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, G[arrison] K[ent] Hall & Co., →ISBN...
Antonyms:

prickly

gooey meaning in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada

gooey in Tamil

having the consistency of goo: soft or viscous, and sticky: கொழகொழ koḻakoḻa

gooey in Malayalam

viscous, sticky, viscid: ഒട്ടുന്ന, ഒട്ടിപ്പിടിക്കുന്ന, ജാതുഷ, പശിമയുള്ള, പശയായ, സംലഗ്നശീലമായ
sentimental, mawkish, cloying: വികാരപരമായ, പെെങ്കിളി, അതിഭാവുകപ്രവണതയുള്ള, അതിഭാവുകത്വം കലർന്ന, പെെങ്കിളിയായ, വികാരതരളമായ

gooey in Kannada

ಜಿಗುಟಾದ, ಅಂಟಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ

Examples of gooey in a sentence

It took months of baking and a lot of choc chips, but finally I cracked the perfect choc chip cookie—gooey in the centre, with a crisp edge and a caramelised nuttiness from the brown butter.2022, Kitty Tait, Al Tait, Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 276:
And maybe Hazira was always going to be a gooey marshland, but that doesn't mean you entice the nation's poorest and most dismissed groups to live there.2023, Rob Verchick, “Climate and Castle”, in The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience, New York, N.Y.; Chichester...
For the worse, if you ask the billions of ordinary people now in daily danger of being atomized, brainwashed, or transmogrified into gooey flesh-sculptures.2023 October 26, Harry Blank, “Wrong Tomorrow […]”, in SCP Foundation (The Breach Goes On; 2), archived from the original on 06 Oct 2024:
I thought you said Spaniards weren't gooey—I've never seen anybody gooeyer than she is about that thing.1980, Ella Leffland, “Glad Offerings”, in Last Courtesies and Other Stories, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, →ISBN, page 147:

All 28 example sentences with gooey

Synonyms of gooey

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

2 more antonymsFewer antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of gooey

Forms of gooey

Adjective
comparative	gooeyer
comparative	gooier
superlative	gooeyest
superlative	gooiest
Noun
plural	gooeys
plural	gooies

Origin of gooey

The adjective is derived from goo + -ey (a variant of -y (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘having the quality of’)). The noun is derived from the adjective.

Words formed from gooey

Phrases with gooey

gooey butter cakes

Words that rhyme with gooey

16 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about gooey

What does gooey mean?: Gooey means having the consistency of goo: soft or viscous, and sticky.
What is gooey in Tamil?: Gooey in Tamil is கொழகொழ (koḻakoḻa). See Gooey meaning in Tamil.
How do you use gooey in a sentence?: It took months of baking and a lot of choc chips, but finally I cracked the perfect choc chip cookie—gooey in the centre, with a crisp edge and a caramelised nuttiness from the brown butter.
What part of speech is gooey?: Gooey can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce gooey?: Gooey is pronounced /ˈɡuːi/ (UK).

Words near gooey in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: gooey (page history and authors); gooey (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); gooey (Kannada 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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-gooey.wav.

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