Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The devil: often as a quasi-proper name, and usually with an epithet (in this use with a capital): as, Old Bogy.
  • noun A hobgoblin; a bugbear.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A specter; a hobgoblin; a bugbear.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Alternative form of bogey.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an evil spirit
  • noun an unidentified (and possibly enemy) aircraft

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Bugaboo is from the archaic term bogy boo -- a term for a hobgoblin or anything that haunts, bothers, bugs, harasses, irks, annoys, or frightens, like the bogeyman.

    Common Grammar Mistakes (PHOTOS) 2011

  • James O'Connor, still only 21 but already with 28 Test caps, wasn't even born the last time Australia won in Auckland in 1986 and said the so-called bogy ground held no fears for the new-age Wallabies.

    NEWS.com.au | Top Stories 2011

  • XC just didn't know how he would take to it at all, but shouldn't have worried, pinging the warm up log. and away we went ... my bogy was the skinny log with pagola thingy in the middle but no worries.

    unknown title 2009

  • Yet, all the same, I know he had to keep his guesses and half-formed opinions pretty well to himself; for the Old Man and the First Mate chaffed him unmercifully about his "bogy".

    The Ghost Pirates: Chapter 4 1909

  • "bogy," changed their minds and sidled toward the Democratic lines.

    History of the United States, Volume 5 (of 6) Elisha Benjamin Andrews 1880

  • I hunted in Alaska last october for caribou and anyone who wants to shoot a moose in the tundra or bogy bottoms and get the meat out is tough!

    More on Sarah Palin, Moose Hunting, and Other Stuff 2008

  • America's present day myths (Our Health Care System is the best those inferiors that can't make it are the cause of our being robbed of our rights, Obama is a foreigner, Sotomayor is a racist, if we drill domestically we will be OK) are precipitant arguments which address the needs of those who have to focus on outside bogy men.

    Paranoia, Sanity and Right Wing Violence 2009

  • It is disappointing to hear President Obama follow the tired public-manipulation tactic of raising a rag-tag army or third-rate dictator to bogy-man status.

    Presidential Fictions that Bind Us to Afghanistan 2009

  • Some might think that this strategy is targeted at the so-called "Security Mom" demographic -- women supposedly so frightened by the terrorist bogy man that they will forsake all other concerns, like reproductive choice and health care, and vote Republican.

    Stephen Ducat: Emasculation in Republican Psychological Warfare, And Why It Works 2008

  • For, as the vapours came up out of the hole, the bogy smelt them with his nostrils, and combed them and sorted them with his combs; and then, when they steamed up through them against his wings, they were changed into showers and streams of metal.

    The Water Babies 2007

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