Meaning
Completely lazy; unwilling to make even the smallest effort. It is chiefly British and informal, and it condemns a settled habit of avoiding work rather than momentary tiredness, which makes it disparaging rather than good-humoured. British informal and disparaging; used in complaint about character, not fatigue. Regional use: British English.
Origin
The earliest known record is Scottish: John Jamieson's 1825 Supplement to the Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language enters bane-idle, defined as totally unoccupied, from Lanarkshire. Thomas Carlyle used the same Scots form bane-idle in an 1836 letter, attributing it to his mother, and the English spelling appears by 1839 in Thomas Miller's novel Fair Rosamond. The most plausible account of bone, set out cautiously by Word Histories, treats it as an intensifier with the force of through to the bone - laziness penetrating to the skeleton - a reading supported by Robert Forby's 1830 Vocabulary of East Anglia, which records the parallels bone-lazy, bone-sore, and bone-tired for conditions that had reached the very bones. That explanation remains inference rather than certainty: Jamieson hazarded a picture of having nothing to eat but an already-picked bone, and Carlyle glossed the phrase as as idle as an old bone.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- bone lazy
- bone-idleness
Usage Examples
- Her brother is bone idle; he has never once mowed the lawn without being paid.
- The inspector branded the crew bone idle after finding the scaffolding untouched for a third week.
- I am not bone idle, she told her mother, I am conserving energy for the night shift.