Word.ws English Dictionary

raw-head and bloody-bones

raw-head and bloody-bones proper noun: a malicious bogeyman (or two bogeymen) formerly used to frighten children into good behaviour.

Proper noun

raw-head and bloody-bones

  1. A malicious bogeyman (or two bogeymen) formerly used to frighten children into good behaviour.
    • In his New View of London (1708), Hatton assures us that hackney coachmen in the City were wont to swear "by Gog and Magog" [...] Some apprentices, he tells us, were as "frighted at the names of Gog and Magog as little children are at the terrible sound of Raw-head and Bloody-bones"[.]1928, Lewis Spence, Mysteries of Britain, page vii. 169

Forms of raw-head and bloody-bones

alternative formRaw-head and Bloody-bones

Questions about raw-head and bloody-bones

What does raw-head and bloody-bones mean?
Raw-head and bloody-bones means a malicious bogeyman (or two bogeymen) formerly used to frighten children into good behaviour.
What part of speech is raw-head and bloody-bones?
Raw-head and bloody-bones is a proper noun.

Words near raw-head and bloody-bones in the dictionary

  1. raw-boned
  2. raw-dog
  3. raw-dogged
  4. raw-dogging
  5. raw-dogs
  6. raw-head and bloody-bones
  7. Rawalpindi
  8. Rawalpindi Division
  9. Rawan
  10. Rawang
  11. rawap

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: raw-head and bloody-bones (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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