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bushy

UK/ˈbʊʃi/US/ˈbʊʃi/
adjectiveC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — bush sits at #1,928neutral

Bushy means growing thick and shaggy. Eyebrows, beards and the tails of certain animals.

It describes hair that grows outwards rather than lying flat, which is why bushy eyebrows are so noticeable and why a squirrel's tail is the standard example. Plants get it too, and a bushy plant is dense and well branched rather than leggy, which gardeners encourage by pinching out the tips. Bushy-tailed appears in the phrase bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, meaning alert and eager.

Definitions of bushy

  1. 1adjectivebushyGrowing thickly and untidily, of hair or a plant.C1

    “He had enormous bushy eyebrows.”

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *bʰuH- — to grow

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *buskaz — bush, thicket

  3. Proto-West Germanic

    *busk

  4. Old English

    *busċ

  5. Middle English

    bush

  6. English

    bush

  7. English, today

    bushy

Built from

  • *bysċ · Old English — copse, grove, scrub

From bush + -y. bush comes from Middle English bush, from Old English busċ, bysċ (“copse, grove, scrub”), from Proto-West Germanic busk, from Proto-Germanic buskaz (“bush, thicket”), probably from Proto-Indo-European bʰuH- (“to grow”). a doublet of bosque. 2 Cognate with stq Busk (“bush”), West Frisian bosk (“forest”), Dutch bos (“forest, wood”), German Busch (“bush, shrub; small forest, grove”), lb Bësch (“forest, wood”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk busk (“bush, shrub”), Icelandic buski (“bush, shrub”), Swedish buske (“bush, shrub”), Persian بیشه (“woods”). Latin and Romance forms (Latin boscus, Occitan bòsc, French bois, bûche and buisson, Italian bosco and boscaglia, Spanish bosque, Portuguese bosque) derive from the Germanic.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 12 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

bushy in the wild

  • The bushy-tailed opossum (Glironia venusta) is an opossum from South America.

    Bushy-tailed opossum

  • Little is known of the behavior of the bushy-tailed opossum; less than 25 specimens are known.

    Bushy-tailed opossum

  • The giant bushy-tailed cloud rat or Luzon bushy-tailed cloud rat (Crateromys schadenbergi) is a large, endangered species of rodent in the family Muridae.

    Giant bushy-tailed cloud rat

  • The bushy-tailed hairy-footed gerbil (Gerbillurus vallinus) is a species of rodent found in Namibia and South Africa.

    Bushy-tailed hairy-footed gerbil

  • The bushy-tailed woodrat, or packrat (Neotoma cinerea) is a species of rodent in the family Cricetidae found in Canada and the United States.

    Bushy-tailed woodrat

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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.

Related words

  • bush
  • rebuke