Other forms: busiest, busier
Busy means having a lot to do and no spare time. A busy morning, a busy person, too busy to talk. It describes people and it describes stretches of time, and both are everyday.
It also describes places that are full of activity — a busy street, a busy restaurant — and there the word means crowded rather than occupied. Two grammar points. Busy is followed by -ing, not by to: busy writing a report, never busy to write. And busy with takes a noun: busy with the accounts. The old telephone sense survives in American English, where a busy signal is what British English calls the engaged tone.
1adjectivebusyHaving a lot to do.~28%
“She is busy until Thursday.”
synonyms: occupied, engaged
2adjectiveplaceOf a place or a period, full of activity.~70%
“It is a busy road and there is nowhere to park.”
3adjectivedesignOf a design, so full of detail that the eye has nowhere to rest.~2%
“The wallpaper is a bit busy for a small room.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
busy is a state of occupation.
Old English bisig meant occupied or diligent, and the odd thing about it is that no other Germanic language kept the word — Dutch bezig is a borrowing back from English. It has always been spelled with a u and said with an i, which is why it is one of the earliest spellings a learner simply has to memorise.
Proto-West Germanic
*bisīg — diligent; zealous; busy
Old English
bisiġ — busy, occupied, diligent
Middle English
bisy
English, today
busy
From Middle English bisy, busie, from Old English bisiġ (“busy, occupied, diligent”), from Proto-West Germanic bisīg (“diligent; zealous; busy”). Cognate with stq biesich (“active, diligent, hard-working, industrious”), Dutch bezig (“busy”), Low German besig (“busy”). The spelling with ⟨u⟩ represents the pronunciation of the West Midland and Southern dialects while the Modern English pronunciation with is from the dialects of the East Midlands.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA