Busy

How to spell busy

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce busy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does busy mean?

1. adjectiveActively occupied with work or other tasks, with little free time.
2. verbTo occupy oneself or someone with an activity.

Busy in a sentence

• adjective

  The office is unusually busy in the weeks before the tax deadline.

• verb

  He tried to busy himself with chores while he waited for the call.

• adjective

  She was too busy to answer her emails until late evening.

• verb

  The manager would busy the new staff with filing on quiet days.

Where does busy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Busy descends from the Old English adjective bisig, meaning 'occupied', 'diligent', or 'careful', a native Germanic word with close cousins in Old Dutch (bezich) and Middle Low German (besich). Curiously, it has no recorded relatives further afield in the older Germanic languages, so its deeper roots are obscure. The original spelling once matched its sound more closely, but over the centuries the pronunciation drifted while the spelling held onto an older form; in some dialects the vowel was written and said with a 'u' sound, and that 'u' froze into the standard spelling even though most speakers now pronounce it with a short 'i'. This mismatch is exactly the spelling trap: the word sounds like 'bizzy' but is spelled with a 'u'. The same odd 'u-spelt, i-said' pattern survives in the related noun 'business', which was simply busy plus the suffix -ness.

How the word is built

• busy (from Old English bisig: occupied, diligent); no separable prefix or suffix