Bullish

How to spell bullish

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bullish

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bullish mean?

1. adjectiveExpecting or favouring a rise in market prices; optimistic about an investment going up.
2. adjectiveAggressively confident and optimistic about a situation or outcome.

Bullish in a sentence

• Analysts turned bullish on the stock after the strong earnings report.

• The chief executive sounded bullish about the company's plans for next year.

• The fund manager remained bullish on gold despite the recent dip.

• She felt bullish about her chances of landing the promotion.

Where does bullish come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The adjective is built on the noun 'bull', which has meant a male of the cattle family since Old English, where it appeared as 'bula', related to Old Norse 'boli'. By the early 1700s, London stock traders had begun calling someone who bought in expectation of rising prices a 'bull', perhaps because a charging bull tosses its horns upward, the very direction such a speculator wants prices to move; the opposite trader, betting on a fall, became a 'bear'. The suffix '-ish', a native English ending meaning 'tending toward' or 'somewhat like', was added to turn the noun into a descriptive adjective. 'Bullish' was being used of confident, price-raising market sentiment by the 1880s, and the figurative sense of 'generally optimistic or aggressively confident' followed soon after. The single 'l' that doubles inside the word is the usual spelling trap: the base 'bull' already carries two letter l's before '-ish' is even added.

How the word is built

• bull (rising-market speculator)
• -ish (adjective suffix: tending toward)