Bone-idle

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Utterly lazy. British, Commonwealth, Ireland, idiomatic, not-comparable

    "For the last three weeks I have been going what you call bone-idle."

Adjective
  1. 1
    constitutionally lazy or idle wordnet

Example

More examples

"For the last three weeks I have been going what you call bone-idle."

Etymology

Laziness that penetrates the very bones. Attested 1836. Similar terms (bone-lazy, bone-sore, bone-tired) pre-dated it in The Vocabulary Of East Anglia, 1830, Robert Forby. Compare to the bone.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.