Word.ws English Dictionary

houseboi

houseboi noun: a domestic manservant, particularly colonial.

Noun

houseboi (plural housebois)

  1. A domestic manservant, particularly colonial.
    • “‘Dear Chief: The bearer of this letter, Chow Lan Chu, my houseboi, is a great thief and steals whatever he can lay his hands on. […]’”1922, Stephen Piero Sergius Rudinger de Rodyenko, Small Me: A Story of Shanghai Life, The James A. McCann Company, page 36
    • […] While still a pup, / You put him in a sack, then beat it / With a stick. When howls and yelpings die, / You send the houseboi out to set him free.1969, Louis Johnson, “The Way to Train a Dog” (poem), reprinted in Louis Johnson (poet), Terry Sturm (editor), Selected Poems, Victoria University Press (2000), page 101

Examples of houseboi in a sentence

  • […] he seduces his houseboi’s wife, his Mary, and fires the houseboi. […] ¶ “You’ve got no authority over my private life.1992, Angelika Fremd, The Glass Inferno, University of Queensland Press, →ISBN, pages 123–4:
  • For most colonial wives, the houseboi, the domestic servant, was the first real contact with a native.2007, Anne Dickson-Waiko, “Colonial Enclaves and Domestic Spaces in British New Guinea”, in Kate Darian-Smith et al., editors, Britishness...

Forms of houseboi

pluralhousebois
alternative formhouseboy

Questions about houseboi

What does houseboi mean?
Houseboi means a domestic manservant, particularly colonial.
How do you use houseboi in a sentence?
[…] he seduces his houseboi’s wife, his Mary, and fires the houseboi. […] ¶ “You’ve got no authority over my private life.
What part of speech is houseboi?
Houseboi is a noun.
What is the plural of houseboi?
The plural of houseboi is housebois.

Words near houseboi in the dictionary

  1. houseboaters
  2. houseboating
  3. houseboats
  4. housebodies
  5. housebody
  6. houseboi
  7. housebois
  8. housebook
  9. housebooks
  10. housebot
  11. housebote

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: houseboi (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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