bog
Meanings
- An area of decayed vegetation (particularly sphagnum moss) which forms a wet spongy ground too soft for walking.
- An acidic, chiefly rain-fed (ombrotrophic), peat-forming wetland. (Contrast an alkaline fen, and swamps and marshes.)
- Boggy ground.
- Confusion, difficulty, or any other thing or place that impedes progress in the manner of such areas.
- A place to defecate: originally specifically a latrine or outhouse but now used for any toilet.
- An act or instance of defecation.
- A little elevated spot or clump of earth, roots, and grass, in a marsh or swamp.
- Chicken bog.
- To sink or submerge someone or something into bogland.
- To prevent or slow someone or something from making progress.
- To sink and stick in bogland.
- To be prevented or impeded from making progress, to become stuck.
- To defecate, to void one's bowels.
- To cover or spray with excrement.
- To make a mess of something.
- Alternative form of bug: a bugbear, monster, or terror.
- Bold; boastful; proud.
- Puffery, boastfulness.
- To provoke, to bug.
- To go away.
- To perform excessive cosmetic surgery that results in a bizarre or obviously artificial facial appearance.
- To have excessive cosmetic surgery performed on oneself, often with a poor or conspicuously unnatural result.
- Initialism of boots on the ground.
- Initialism of Bank of Ghana.
- Initialism of (Federal Reserve) Board of Governors.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English bog (originally chiefly in Ireland and Scotland), from Irish and Scottish Gaelic bogach (“soft, boggy ground”), from Old Irish bog (“soft”), from Proto-Celtic *buggos (“soft, tender”) + Old Irish -ach, from Proto-Celtic *-ākos. The frequent use to form compounds regarding the animals and plants in such areas mimics Irish compositions such as bog-luachair (“bulrush, bogrush”). Its use for toilets is now often derived from the resemblance of latrines and outhouse cesspools to bogholes, but the noun sense appears to be a clipped form of boghouse (“outhouse, privy”), which derived (possibly via boggard) from the verb to bog, still used in Australian English. The derivation and its connection to other senses of "bog" remains uncertain, however, owing to an extreme lack of early citations due to its perceived vulgarity.