bosky

comparative boskier · superlative boskiest

1. Having abundant bushes, shrubs or trees.

   We rambled around wet fields and bosky paths that smelled of jasmine.

   2018, Lauren Collins, “What Women Want”, in The New Yorker

   4 more examples

   And the fields; they must have been a little more trackless and irregular, more bosky and tumbled, retaining a little more hill and dale, an irregularity which generation after generation of ploughing has nearly counteracted ; […].

   1886, David Masson, Sir George Grove, John Morley, Mowbray Morris, Macmillan's Magazine, volume 54, page 24

   A long olive-grove secretes the garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses.

   1911 October 26, Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson, or, An Oxford Love Story, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: John Lane Company, published 1912, →OCLC

   Even in 1869 it had had more than half a century of development, and to judge from photographs must already have been a place of charm. Indeed, it seems to have had at that time more and finer trees than now, and to have been more bosky with scattered copses and masses of shrubbery.

   1930, Samuel Eliot Morison, The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869-1929, page 345

   The Harvard Yard is also darkened and made to seem far more bosky and umbrageous than it was.

   c. 1936, George Santayana, edited by William G. Holzberger, The Letters of George Santayana, Book Five, 1933-1936, published 2003, page 425

   Synonyms: lush, verdant, greenly, lavish, lush, verdant, verdured, verdurous

2. Caused by trees or shrubs.

   It was open, and they looked down the road which was darkened over with long bosky shadows.

   1878, Henry James, The Europeans

3. Bushy, bristling.

   They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.

   1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 5”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

4. obsoleteslangDrunk; inebriated.

   Synonyms: lushed, potted, Adrian Quist, adrip, aled up, all mops and brooms, arseholed, a sheet in the wind