Horny
adj, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Hard or bony, like an animal's horn.
"Two Dwarfs were at the bellows, another was holding a piece of red-hot metal on the anvil with a pair of tongs, a fourth was hammering it, and two, wiping their horny little hands on a greasy cloth, were coming forward to meet the visitors."
- 2 Sexually aroused, with or without physical manifestation; experiencing a feeling of sexual desire. slang
"[H]er thick, gurgling voice saying […]: "Get it in all the way… please, please do… I’m horny.""
- 3 Having the hard consistency and pale colour of an animal's horn.
"She could not see, for her whitish eyes were covered with a horny film."
- 4 Sexually arousing; pornographic. slang
"It's hard to find good fanart of this character because most of the drawings are super horny."
- 5 Having horns.
"In 1997, 4th and 5th grade Waterville Elementary students told me they saw Short-horned lizards (commonly known as Horny toads) all around their area."
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- 6 With an erect penis due to being aroused. obsolete
- 1 made of horn (or of a substance resembling horn) wordnet
- 2 having horns or hornlike projections wordnet
- 3 feeling great sexual desire wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples""Never mind that, what's with that get up ... a swimming suit!?" "That's right. Sexy isn't it? Feeling horny?""
Etymology
From Middle English horny, equivalent to horn + -y. Compare German hornig. Compare also Dutch hoornachtig, Swedish hornaktig, Old English hyrniġ (“angular”). Piecewise doublet of corny.
From the horn (“an erect penis”) + -y (“having the quality of”). The adjective originally meant "erect", but was later was broadened to refer not only to sexual arousal but also to sexual desire in general.
Related phrases
More for "horny"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.