Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Informal Crazy: "When word spread that free gas was to be found, the populace, as expected, went bonkers” ( Washington Post).
Wiktionary
- adj. irrational, crazy
WordNet 3.0
- adj. informal or slang terms for mentally irregular
Etymologies
- Origin unknown.
Examples
“While Stand offers a number of additional abilities to Safari, it is the fact that I can use Stand to force Safari to open all links in new tabs instead of new windows that allows me to use Safari without going bonkers from the profusion of windows that would occur otherwise.”
“Look at the great social reformers of the victorian times and subsequently -- right up until the 1960s when the whole downslide into mass "higher education" in bonkers areas began.”
“The use of the word bonkers should suffice as an explanation.”
“That they were not merely wasting their time, but were in fact bonkers, is now something we accept as a sine qua non of the market economy and is the direct legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s brutal lessons of the 1980s (one of her outstanding and, one hopes, everlasting, achievements) which threw all such notions of State control out of the window.”
“Not, you might argue, much of a distinction, since celebrity diets are by definition bonkers.”
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
“Instead, they supported a Labour amendment to stop the line at Haymarket - a move described as "bonkers" by the chief executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce.”
“Word around my home is that I do not go "bonkers," I go "Bollywood.”
“He also asked me if I have any illegitimate children, claimed never to have heard of Alex Ovechkin, said he once bedded 10 women the night before a Redskins game and requested I define the term "bonkers," but it's kind of hard to tell what's real and what's part of the show.”
The Washington Post: My first time on Dexter Manley's TV show
“It was the kind of bonkers, hair-shirted remark (in an otherwise very good speech) which taints the environmental movement.”
“Apologies for Wordie going kind of bonkers while I sorted out DNS issues related to changing hosts.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘bonkers’.
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Of Imitative Origin
Words formed in imitation of the sound of the things they signify.
bawl, biff, blizzard, blob, blooper, bob, boff, bomb, bonkers, boo, borborygmus, brouhaha and 148 more...
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Bonkers
List for old and new terms and phrases meaning crazy, nuts, batty, prone to extreme nervousness, etc.
bonkers, crazy, nuts, batty, batchy, bats in the belfry, scatty, crackers, windy, gone crackers, cracked, dingo and 92 more...
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Auslang
Australian colloquialisms, slang and unique lingual artifacts.
bludger, strewth, shonky, cow cockie, sickie, woop woop, chunder, furphy, buckley's chance, whinge, root barrier, nuff nuff and 8 more...
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Onk-tastic
Words containing the sound /ŏngk/.
Algonquin, Cronkite, Tonka, Tonkin, Wonka, Yonkers, bonk, bonkers, bronco, broncobuster, conk, conker and 31 more...
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Mentally irregular
Words for the mentally irregular
bonkers, unhinged, batshit crazy, cognitive dissonance, apophenia, undone, loony, unsound, deranged, a bit off the beam, daft, stark ravin' mad and 19 more...
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Bonkers
crackers, barmy, half-baked, mental, unhinged, barking, cuckoo, cracked, nuts, mad, insane, touched and 24 more...
arby bonk "to hit," 1931, probably of imitative origin; 1975 in sense of "have sexual intercourse with." Bonkers "crazy," 1957, British slang, perhaps from earlier naval slang meaning "slightly drunk" (1948), from notion of a thump on the head.
Jul 19, 2007
abraxaszugzwang Remember the candy from Nabisco? There were always those weird ads in comic books. Man, I loved the strawberry ones. Mar 5, 2007