Blowsy flowers, blowsy women and Beryl Cook. But what does blowsy mean?

Here’s a thing. I like to preen myself (Pretty Polly! Pretty Polly!) on having an extensive vocabulary, active and passive.

But there’s a word my partner has used quite often – blowzy or blowsy or ?blousy – that is clean outside my idiolect.

It’s clear from what they apply it to that they use it to mean ‘gaudily showy; showy in an overblown and slightly tasteless way’. The object most recently so classified was these admittedly rather showy orange-and-yellow ‘Franz Hals’ day lilies (Hemerocallis). And it’s clear that my partner links the word to blouse, the item of clothing.

The day lilies may be a bit of a Marmite taste, but we grew to rather like them, in the end, and they went on flowering for a couple of months, so they were great value … but I digress.

When asked for an example, my partner cited Beryl Cook’s generous-busted lipsticky women, which is interesting in view of the word’s historical meaning. ^[1]

Intrigued, I decided to do a little survey on Twitter to ask what the word meant for people.

The questions and answers were these:

What does blowzy/blowsy mean in your vocabulary?

Unkempt, slatternly	6.5%
Vulgar & colourful, showy	58.7%
Both the above	17.4%
Nothing	17.4%

So, for a good proportion, blowzy/blowsy/?blousy means nothing at all (Phew! I wasn’t alone), but for the largest proportion, it seems to mean something that the dictionaries don’t recognise, while the historical meaning gets a mere quarter of votes (combining rows 1 and 3).

How do people use it?

People don’t use it that much, so there isn’t that much data. The screenshot below from the Corpus of Contemporary American shows 28 of the 59 examples therein. (To give you an idea of how infrequent blowsy is, it appears in a mere 58 texts out of the 485,202 the corpus contains and is the fifty-five-thousand-six-hundred-and-nineteenth most frequent word.)

As reading the examples will quickly show, most refer to women, but four examples refer to flowers or flower heads, and six more refer to plants or gardens, three of which are shown: blowsy British charm, blowsy clump of feather reed grass, blowsy double anemones.  

What exactly is the historical meaning?

That historical ‘meaning’ turns out, as the OED defines it in an entry as yet unrevised for the third edition, to be three meanings:

1. having a bloated face; red and coarse-complexioned; flushed-looking
2. Of hair, dress: Dishevelled, frowzy, slatternly.
3. Coarse; rustic.

Sadly, it is one of those countless disparaging and sexist words that belittle female appearance.

One of the examples for OED meaning 1 is from 1778, at a time when for a woman to have a pale complexion was a mark of gentility and bleeding, presumably, was thought to take away any ruddiness.

Thinking herself too ruddy & blowsy, it was her Custom to bleed herself … 3 or 4 times against the Rugby Races.

(against here means ‘in preparation for the time of’ or ‘ahead of’ as journos phrase and overuse it.)

As for ‘dishevelled’, which seems to be the earliest meaning, c.1770, there’s a nice Thackeray citation from 1854:

Smiled at him from under her blousy curl-papers.

(Those ‘curl papers’ are the forerunners of curlers.)

However, the 1770 meaning applies to a man, whereas most citations for blowzy 1 & 2 are clearly gendered.

Finally, meaning 3 (‘coarse, rustic’) has this single OED example from 1851.

 I cannot fancy the blowsy wisdom of the country.

Other dictionaries such as the Collins Unabridged, the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) and Merriam-Webster (M-W) tend to conflate the meanings.

Collins conflates those three to two:

1. (esp of a woman) untidy in appearance; slovenly or sluttish

2. (of a woman) ruddy in complexion; red-faced.

M-W reverses the order but keeps the same two meanings:

1: having a sloppy or unkempt appearance or aspect: FROWSY

2: being coarse and ruddy of complexion

And gives this colourful example:

a large, blowsy woman in frumpy clothes runs the diner.

(Jackpot! if you know what frowsy means.)

ODE kills those three OED birds with one stone and has ‘Coarse, untidy, and red-faced (typically used of a woman)’ and gives first a sort of Beryl Cook-ian example and then one about roses, labelled ‘figurative’:

the cheap perfume worn by the blowsy woman

blowsy, old-fashioned roses

Interestingly, the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), which is aimed at non-mother tongue speakers, defines it as below and labels it not only British and informal but also ‘disapproving’:

an offensive way to describe a woman who you think looks large, fat and untidy.

Macmillan follows a similar train but is cunningly gender-neutral

a blowzy person looks untidy and is often rather fat

whereas Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) reinstates the sexist angle:

a blowsy woman is fat and looks untidy

And finally, Cambridge adds a final indignity, badly fitting clothes:

A blowsy woman is rather fat and looks untidy, often with badly fitting clothes.

How should I spell it?

The dictionaries are divided. Most give blowsy as the principal form and cross-refer blowzy to it (thus LDOCE, OALD, Collins, ODE, M-W, Cambridge) and a couple do the opposite (Macmillan, American Heritage). None admit ?blousy, which is how I suspect more than a few people would automatically spell it.

For what it’s worth, a trawl in one corpus showed blowsy to be by far the preferred spelling (141), followed, ahem, by ?blousy (70) then blowzy (12). The fact that blousy occurs so often suggests that people do indeed link the meaning to blouse.

What does the word mean nowadays?

Well, if my poll on Twitter is anything to go by – and the people who replied are very likely to have been clued up linguistically – it means something not quite covered by yet extending current dictionaries: ‘vulgar, showy; tastelessly ostentatious; garish’ and can be applied to objects as well as to people. Only ODE has an example illustrating that meaning – blowsy, old-fashioned roses – but doesn’t cover that meaning at all in its definition. The examples in the screenshot shown earlier support that interpretation.

And does it have anything to do with blouses etymologically?

Nope. Nix. Though a connection with blouses would give plenty of scope for fantastical folk-etymologising, the root of the word lies elsewhere. In the sixteenth century, a blowze might be, as the OED defines it, ’A beggar’s trull, a beggar wench; a wench.’ (trull = ‘prostitute’ or disparagingly, ‘girl’.)

Then two eighteenth-century lexicographers introduced, or rather, recorded, the plumpness and the ruddiness – in short, the whole Beryl Cookery:

‘A fat, red-faced, bloted wench, or one whose head is dressed like a slattern’ (Bailey, An Universal Etymological Dictionary, 1731); ‘a ruddy fat-faced wench’ (Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755).

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[1] It’s worth taking a look at the picture in the link. The title is ‘Ladies who lunch’, but these are not upper-middle class, moneyed sophisticates. They drink from the bottle with one hand while fagging with the other, and the lunch looks suspiciously like fish fingers, or, if not them, something breadcrumbed.