Dreamy means lost in thought, or lovely in a hazy way. A dreamy expression, dreamy music, a dreamy afternoon.
Of a person it means inattentive and pleasantly so; of a scene or a sound it means soft-edged and lovely. In older slang it meant attractive, as in he is dreamy, which now sounds like something from a film of the 1950s.
1adjectivedreamyLost in thought, or lovely in a hazy way.
“She had a dreamy look on her face as she gazed out of the window.”
dreamy is a quality.
Dream plus -y. Dream is Old English, where the word first meant joy or music.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰrewgʰ-
Middle English
drem
English
dream
English, today
dreamy
Built from
From dream + y. dream comes from Middle English drem. From Middle English dream, dreem, dreeme, drem, dreme, dræm, from Old English drēam, drēm, drīm (“joy; melody, music; frenzy”), from Proto-West Germanic draum, from Proto-Germanic draumaz (“dream”), from earlier draugmaz, from Proto-Indo-European dʰrowgʰ-mos, from dʰrewgʰ- (“to deceive”). The sense of "dream", though not attested in Old English, may still have been present (compare Old Saxon drōm (“bustle, revelry, jubilation", also "dream”)), and was undoubtedly reinforced later in Middle English by Old Norse draumr (“dream”), from same Proto-Germanic root.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA