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:
Timby, smiling at her boyfriend of one year, agrees.
From BBC ● Sep. 18, 2026
Her love life proves to be as evanescent as her artistic medium; when the novel begins, Tor learns that her boyfriend, Andreas, is cheating on her.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 15, 2026
Panettiere lived in Los Angeles, but her boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, is a Greenville native, according to authorities.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2026
Holly's boyfriend, who was inside the house at the time, answers the door to the man and moves his car off the drive in front of the house.
From BBC ● Sep. 5, 2026
“Now, is fate responsible for making you Alma’s boyfriend? That I don’t know.”
From "Millionaires for the Month" by Stacey McAnulty
It’s women bringing their boyfriends, women who now bring their husbands, couples coming together, and I love it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 1, 2026
The barbarians of buyouts past, it seems, are now the sought-after boyfriends of the beautiful and famous.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 8, 2026
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
“We’ll just be the kinds of girls who have boyfriends in college.”
From "If I Stay" by Gayle Forman
Definitions 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.
