billowy - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
billowy (comparative billowier, superlative billowiest)
- Swelling or swollen into large waves; full of billows or surges; resembling billows.
- ✤ He was shabby and careless, with inkstains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot.1
- ✤ […] Tiare clasped me to her vast bosom, so that I seemed to sink into a billowy sea, and pressed her red lips to mine.2
- ✤ This allows the muscular man to order a suit whose jacket fits him in the chest and shoulders and is not billowy through the waist and hips; and whose trousers fit him in the waist but whose legs are not reminiscent of harem pants.3
Etymology
From billow + -y.
Pronunciation
- (UK) IPA: /ˈbɪ.ləʊ.(w)i/
- Audio (Southern England): 🔊
- Rhymes: -ɪləʊ(w)i
Printed 2026-09-15.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Footnotes
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1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 200: ↩
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1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter LVIII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC: ↩
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2006, Nicholas Antongiavanni [pseudonym; Michael Anton], The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 28: ↩