boyfriend
Americanadjective
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of boyfriend
Explanation
A boyfriend is a male romantic partner. Your cousin might ask if she can bring her boyfriend to the family Thanksgiving dinner this year. Usually, your boyfriend is a boy or man you're romantically involved with. Your aunt might join a dating site after breaking up with her boyfriend, and your ten year old neighbor might announce she has a boyfriend after a boy leaves a candy bar on her desk. The words boyfriend and girlfriend first appeared in the early 1900s, around the start of modern dating in the US.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
She would like to set up home with her boyfriend, who lives in the eastern city of Valencia, but the couple says apartment prices are out of their reach.
From Barron's ● Oct. 15, 2026
She and her boyfriend, Cheng Ming, plan to study AI in hopes of finding tech jobs.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 13, 2026
But she and her boyfriend of five years are nowhere near thinking of settling down.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 13, 2026
Ella Ford, 24, from Moreton, Wirral, had visited the park with her boyfriend and filmed the tiger moments before the attack.
From BBC ● Oct. 11, 2026
“She broke up with her boyfriend or something,” Erlan told me.
From Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff
The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, along with the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died.
From Barron's ● Jul. 15, 2026
The wedding, this theory goes, was payback for 20 years’ worth of media that characterized her as desperate and lovelorn and having only herself to blame for boyfriends who wilted under the media’s gaze.
From Salon ● Jul. 9, 2026
Meanwhile, a parallel trend has emerged of boyfriends documenting how the movie left them rattled.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 28, 2026
Wives read everything, girlfriends read everything, boyfriends read everything.
From BBC ● Feb. 24, 2026
She said I looked like Ava Gardner, who Lynn said was a beautiful famous actress with about seventy thousand boyfriends.
From "Kira-Kira" by Cynthia Kadohata
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
