Buggy

How to spell buggy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce buggy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does buggy mean?

1. nounA small, light vehicle, such as a baby carriage, a golf cart, or a one-horse carriage.
2. adjectiveFull of faults or errors, especially software; or infested with insects.

Buggy in a sentence

• noun

  She folded the buggy and lifted it onto the train.

• adjective

  The update was so buggy that the team rolled it back.

• noun

  The resort lets guests drive a buggy between the holes.

• adjective

  The old cabin felt damp and buggy after the rain.

Where does buggy come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The noun buggy first appears in English in the mid-1700s as the name for a light, one-horse carriage, and its ultimate origin is genuinely obscure; lexicographers have never pinned down a parent word, which is why dictionaries flag it as 'of unknown origin'. From that early sense of a small, nimble vehicle the word spread to all sorts of compact conveyances: the baby buggy, the golf buggy, the dune buggy. The adjective buggy is a separate, transparent formation, built from the noun bug (an insect) plus the suffix -y, so it first meant simply 'infested with insects'. When early computer engineers adopted bug to describe a hidden fault in a machine or program, buggy slid naturally into the sense of 'full of errors'. In both the vehicle and the insect words the spelling doubles the g before the suffix, a regular English habit that keeps the preceding vowel short, the same rule that gives us muggy and foggy.

How the word is built

• bug (origin uncertain)
• -gy (adjective/noun suffix, with the g doubled before the vowel)