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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

bothy.

A small cottage or hut; specifically (Scotland), one often left unlocked for communal use in a remote, often mountainous, area by hikers, labourers, etc.

5 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈbɒθi/Received-Pronunciation/ˈbɑθi/General-American/ˈbʌhi/Ireland/ˈbɔθe/Scotland
  1. A small cottage or hut; specifically (Scotland), one often left unlocked for communal use in a remote, often mountainous, area by hikers, labourers, etc.

  2. A building for workers to rest in.

  3. A building on a farm, sometimes with just one room, for (usually unmarried male) farmworkers or other labourers to live in.

    historical
Where this word comes from

Probably from booth + -y (diminutive suffix). Booth is ultimately derived from Proto-Germanic *bōþō (“building; dwelling; hut”), from *būaną (“to dwell, reside”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰuH- (“to be”). The short vowel /ɒ/, /ɑ/, etc., in the first syllable instead of the long vowel /uː/ in booth may be due to the influence of Irish both and Scottish Gaelic both (“booth, hut”), which have the same etymology as booth.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.