Other forms: bosoms
The bosom is a woman's chest, or the heart as the seat of feeling. Held to her bosom, the bosom of the family, a bosom friend.
It is old-fashioned and literary in both senses. In the bosom of the family means safely at its centre. A bosom friend is an intimate one, and bosom buddy is the American version. Note that bosom is now mildly comic in the anatomical sense, which is why it appears in period drama and almost nowhere else; and that the pronunciation is BUZZ-um.
1nounwomansA woman's chest.
“The old nanny held the crying baby to her bosom and rocked it gently.”
2nounbosomThe heart as the seat of feeling.
“He returned to the bosom of a family he had not seen in nine years.”
bosom is a chest or inner place.
Old English bosm comes from a root meaning to swell or curve. It named the chest and the fold of a garment across it, which is why things could be carried in somebody's bosom.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰuH-
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰewH- — to swell, bend, curve
Proto-Germanic
*bōsmaz
Proto-West Germanic
*bōsm
Old English
bōsm
Middle English
bosom
English, today
bosom
From Middle English bosom, bosum, from Old English bōsm, from Proto-West Germanic bōsm, from Proto-Germanic bōsmaz, from Proto-Indo-European bʰewH- (“to swell, bend, curve”). Cognate with stq Bossem, Bousem (“bosom”), West Frisian boezem (“bosom”), Dutch boezem (“bosom”), German Busen (“bosom”). Related also to Albanian buzë (“lip”), Greek βυζί (“breast”), Romanian buză (“lip”), Irish bus (“lip”), and Latin bucca (“cheek”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire