bawdy

UK/ˈbɔːdi/US/ˈbɔ.di/

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,990 of 15,258neutral

Bawdy means humorously rude about sex. A bawdy song, bawdy humour, bawdy jokes.

The humour is the point — bawdy is cheerful and public where obscene is neither, which is why the word suits Chaucer and music-hall songs. It is dated enough now to sound like a literary judgement rather than a complaint.

Definitions of bawdy

1adjectivebawdyHumorously rude about sex.C1
“The sailors sang bawdy songs in the pub until the landlord told them to go home.”

bawdy is a quality of humour.

Where it comes from

From bawd + -y.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

bawdy in the wild

Blue comedy is also referred to as "bawdiness" or being "bawdy".
Ribaldry
Handy, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, and Big Maybelle and skits peppered with bits of bawdy humor.
Black and Blue (musical)
Eliza Fraser is a 1976 Australian bawdy adventure drama film, directed by Tim Burstall and starring Susannah York, Trevor Howard, Noel Ferrier and John Castle.
Eliza Fraser (film)
As the historian Tim Harris describes it: "The riots broke out on Easter Monday, 23 March 1668, when a group attacked bawdy houses in Poplar.
Bawdy House Riots of 1668
The Merry Muses of Caledonia is a collection of bawdy songs said to have been collected or written by Robert Burns, the 18th-century Scottish poet.
The Merry Muses of Caledonia

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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