Bloody

How to spell bloody

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bloody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bloody mean?

1. adjectiveCovered in, stained with, or consisting of blood.

Bloody in a sentence

• The nurse changed the bloody bandage before the doctor arrived.

• He wiped his bloody knuckles after the fall on the gravel.

Where does bloody come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English blod, the native Germanic name for the red fluid that circulates in the body, combined with the productive suffix -y that turns a noun into an adjective meaning 'full of' or 'covered with'. The literal sense, 'stained or running with blood', is recorded from the earliest periods of English. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word had taken on a second life in Britain as an intensifier, roughly equivalent to 'very' or 'extremely'; the precise route to that use is debated, with explanations ranging from associations with aristocratic 'bloods' (rowdy young men) to simple emphatic exaggeration. Notice that the double 'o' comes straight from blod, while the vowel is pronounced like 'bluh', which is exactly the mismatch that trips writers up. The same blood root still underlies relatives such as 'bleed' and 'bless', and the spelling has stayed stubbornly conservative even as the pronunciation drifted.

How the word is built

• blood (Old English blod, the red fluid of the body)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'full of' or 'covered with')