Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com
Synonyms

barfly

American  
[bahr-flahy] / ˈbɑrˌflaɪ /

noun

Slang.
  • barflies
    plural
  1. a person who frequents barrooms.


barfly British  
/ ˈbɑːflaɪ /

noun

  1. informal a person who frequents bars

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

Etymology

Origin of barfly

An Americanism dating back to 1905–10; bar 1 + fly 1

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:

One disappointed man with a Gallrein sticker walked out, while a lone barfly looked at a broadcast of a PGA golf tournament.

From Slate May 19, 2026

A daughter of Washington, D.C.’s Black bourgeoisie, Horn often attired herself in furs and white gloves, but she could outlast even the hardiest barfly as the night wore on.

From New York Times Apr. 3, 2024

Jayme Hoskins has turned into a baseball barfly and let the free beers fly during recent Phillies’ postseason games.

From Seattle Times Nov. 2, 2022

Bobby doesn’t mind — handsome, intelligent and possessing a secret stash of dough, he appears to move above the concerns of his barfly cohort.

From Los Angeles Times Oct. 21, 2022

And it should have been obvious to me, maybe not that he was an Executive Special, but that he was certainly no drunken barfly.

From Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper

In Crescent City, a remote Northern California harbor town where tsunamis are a way of life, the Tuesday evening barflies gathered at Port O’Pints Brewing Co. were decidedly blasé about the possibility of impending disaster.

From Los Angeles Times Jul. 30, 2025

A trio of barflies try to track down a winning lottery ticket that was stolen from them in “Two Lottery Tickets,” which the Chicago Reader calls an “enjoyably deadpan Romanian comedy.”

From Washington Post May 19, 2021

They always exerted a gravitational pull on the clotheslines and barflies and flyswatters and carpenters and Donalds and Lydias and other earthly things that populated the extended John Prine universe.

From Slate Apr. 8, 2020

Alternately rousing and yearning, this is a gorgeous hymn to barflies, precious memories and the joys of being a ghost, told with a dash of Edgar Allan Poe and Thelonious Monk.

From The Guardian Mar. 23, 2020

He pushed his way past the man in Space Grays and shouldered past a couple of barflies as he left.

From Postmark Ganymede by Robert Silverberg

Vocabulary.com logo
by dictionary.com

Dictionary.com's Learning Companion

Go beyond just looking up words.
Remember them forever with VocabTrainer.

Start training