looby
looby noun: a large and awkward or clumsy person; an oaf.
Noun
looby (plural loobies)
- A large and awkward or clumsy person; an oaf.
- ‘Depend upon it, Sir, a savage, when he is hungry, will not carry about with him a looby of nine years old, who cannot help himself.’1791, James Boswell, Life of Johnson, Oxford, published 2008, page 1227
- Thus while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader's imagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords […].1872, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book IV, chapter 35
Proper noun capitalized: Looby
Looby (plural Loobys)
- A surname from Irish.
Forms of looby
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | loobies |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Loobys |
Origin of looby
Uncertain. Perhaps from lob (“a large piece, lump”) + -y.
Reduced Anglicized form of Irish Ó Lúbaigh (“descendant of Lúbach”), a byname originally applied to a cunning person, from lúbach (“looped, coiled; crafty, tricky”).
Words formed from looby
Phrases with looby
Words that rhyme with looby
Questions about looby
- What does looby mean?
- Looby means a large and awkward or clumsy person; an oaf.
- What part of speech is looby?
- Looby can be a noun or a proper noun.
- What is the plural of looby?
- The plural of looby is loobies.
Words near looby in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: looby (page history and authors); Looby (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-looby.wav.
Cite this entry: “looby.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/looby. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.