Other forms: buoys, buoyed
A buoy is a floating marker anchored to warn or to guide. A channel buoy, a mooring buoy, round the buoy.
Buoys are colour-coded and shaped by an international system so that sailors can read them: red and green mark the sides of a channel, and cardinal buoys show which side of a danger is safe. A mooring buoy is one you tie to. It is pronounced BOY in Britain and BOO-ee in America. Note buoyant, meaning floating and, of a mood or market, cheerful; and buoy up, meaning to keep somebody's spirits from sinking.
1nounbuoyA floating marker anchored to warn or guide.
“A red buoy bobbed in the water to mark the edge of the channel.”
2verbkeepTo keep somebody's spirits up.
“The team was buoyed by the cheering crowd and played its best game of the season.”
buoy is a floating marker.
Middle Dutch boeye comes from a Frankish word meaning a beacon — the same root as beacon itself. A buoy is a beacon that floats, and both words come from the same idea of a signal.
Proto-Germanic
*baukną
Frankish
*baukn — beacon
Old French
boue — piece of wood or cork that floats above an anchor to indicate where it is anchored
Middle Dutch
boeye — float, buoy
Middle English
boy
English, today
buoy
Built from
From Middle English boy, boye, from Middle Dutch boeye (“float, buoy”), from Old French boue (“piece of wood or cork that floats above an anchor to indicate where it is anchored”) (modern French bouée), ultimately from Frankish baukn (“beacon”), from Proto-Germanic baukną. a doublet of beacon. Alternatively, and perhaps less likely (due to the unexplained shift in meaning), from Middle Dutch boeye (“shackle, fetter”), from Old French buie (“fetter, chain”), from Latin boia (“a (leather) collar, band, fetter”), from Ancient Greek βόεος, βόειος (“of ox-hide”), from βοῦς (“ox”), from Proto-Indo-European gʷṓws (“cow”). sign language was coined by Scott K. Lindell in 2003.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA