Other forms: buzzes, buzzed, buzzing
Buzz is the low rough hum a bee makes — a sound you feel as much as hear. A wasp trapped behind the curtain, a strip light dying in an empty corridor, your phone rattling face-down on a wooden table.
Buzz is a verb and a noun. Things buzz — flies, fridges, old speakers — and so do people: you buzz a visitor in through the front door, and you can buzz around a kitchen all morning without sitting down once. The noun does three jobs: the sound itself, the buzz of that strip light; the excitement gathering around something new, buzz about a film, a real buzz around the launch; and a small thrill, the sort cold water gives some people. Keep it apart from hype, which is what the sellers manufacture; buzz is what the crowd does on its own.
1verbbuzzTo make a low, rough, continuous humming sound.~59%
“A fly buzzed against the glass all afternoon.”
2nounhumThat humming sound.~8%
“The buzz of the fridge kept her awake.”
3nounmarketingThe excited talk and attention gathering around something new.~29%
“There was real buzz about the shop weeks before it opened.”
synonyms: hype, excitement
4verbpressTo press a buzzer to let someone in or to call them.~4%
“Buzz me in when you get downstairs.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 129 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense (105 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Buzz was not borrowed from anywhere. Middle English already had bussyng, buzzing, and the word is an imitation of the noise itself — the same trick English pulled for hiss and for hum. Scots kept its own version, bizz.
Middle English
*bussen
English, today
buzz
Built from
From Middle English bussen (suggested by bussyng (“buzzing”)), of onomatopoeic origin. Cognate with Scots bizz (“to buzz”). Compare Middle English bunning (“buzzing”), Middle English hossing (“buzzing”), Middle English bissen (“to hush”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA