The AI-powered English dictionary
plural bougies
(medicine) A tapered cylindrical instrument for introducing an object into a tubular anatomical structure, or to dilate such a structure, as with an esophageal bougie. quotations examples
I was not too sure, as a child, what doctors "did," and glimpses of catheters and bougies in their kidney dishes, retractors and speculums, rubber gloves, catgut thread, and forecepts - all this, I think, rather frightened me, though it fascinated me too.
2001, Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Alfred A. Knopf (2001), 12
A wax candle. examples
comparative bougier, superlative bougiest
(slang, usually derogatory) Behaving like or pertaining to people of a higher social status, middle-class / bourgeois people (sometimes carrying connotations of fakeness, elitism, or snobbery). quotations
Hey, look, man, I haven't changed, I'm not gonna change and I'm not down with this bougie stuff.
1991 September 23, “Will Gets a Job”, in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, season 2, episode 3
Called “bougie” when she was growing up, even though she’d never considered herself close to that, Ewing has turned the word around, using it as the title of a fictitious magazine she has dreamed up.
2007 October 12, L. Kent Wolgamott, “Satire pervades the series of fictional magazine covers”, in The Lincoln Journal Star
I'll be on the movie screens / Magazines and bougie scenes
2007, “Glamorous”, performed by Fergie
Shangela is kind of bougie, but she's also your homegirl.
2010 February 1, “Gone With the Window”, in RuPaul's Drag Race, season 2, episode 1
I don't need you or your brand new Benz / Or your bougie friends
2010, “Sleazy”, performed by Ke$ha
Bougie attitude, I'm from the West End / I want the finer things in life
2023, “Outside”, performed by Br3nya
(Britain, Canada, slang) Fancy or good-looking, without the same connotations of snobbery or pretentiousness as in sense 1.
(chiefly African-American Vernacular, slang, usually derogatory) A person who exhibits bougie behavior. quotations
All in all, Black Anglo-Saxons today remain a variegated group, and their numbers continue, relentlessly, to multiply. / In the late 1960's following the first appearance of this book, The Black Anglo-Saxons, street militants and conscious members of the Black middle class popularly called them "bougies."
1991 , Nathan Hare, “Introduction”, in The Black Anglo-Saxons, page iii