Frosh

//fɹɔʃ// noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A frog. dialectal

    "1565 (1593), Golding, Ovid's Met. xv. (1593) pg. 356"

  2. 2
    A first-year student, at certain universities, and a first-or-second-year student at other universities. colloquial

    "The frosh are really getting on my nerves!"

  3. 3
    Ellipsis of frosh week. abbreviation, alt-of, colloquial, ellipsis
Verb
  1. 1
    To initiate academic freshmen, notably in a testing way. slang, transitive

    "This campus does not tolerate froshing in any form."

  2. 2
    To damage through incompetence. slang, transitive

    "Trying to open my car door with a coat hanger, I froshed the mechanism."

Synonyms

All synonyms
fresherfresherfreshiefreshmanfreshmanfrog

Example

More examples

"1565 (1593), Golding, Ovid's Met. xv. (1593) pg. 356"

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English frossh, frosch, from Old English frosc, from Proto-Germanic *fruskaz (“frog”), from Proto-Indo-European *prew- (“to jump, hop”). Cognate with West Frisian froask (“frog”), Dutch vors (“frog”), German Frosch (“frog”), Norwegian frosk (“frog”), Icelandic froskur (“frog”). Doublet of frosk; more at frog.

Etymology 2

Blend of freshman + sophomore.

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