rowdy
Americannoun
adjective
-
rough and disorderly.
rowdy behavior at school.
-
Slang. great; very enjoyable, often with boisterous fun.
a rowdy time at the arcade with my best friends.
- Synonyms:
- obstreperous, unruly, boisterous
adjective
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of rowdy
An Americanism dating back to 1810–20; perhaps from row 3
Explanation
If you’re rowdy, you’re loud and raucous. You’re disturbing the peace and somebody’s likely to ask you to quiet down. When your team wins, if you and your teammates celebrate by running through the streets screaming and wrestling each other on people’s lawns, you’re a rowdy bunch. You may be rough and obnoxious or just rowdy in a good-natured way. But you reserve the name rowdy for a cruel and brutal guy. Remember that bully in the seventh grade who kept taking your lunch money? He was a rowdy.
Vocabulary lists containing rowdy
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
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Schooled
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Frindle
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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:
To survive, it’s trying a rowdy, adults-only solution.
From Slate ● Jun. 29, 2026
Getting bodies in the room is also valuable as the hearings sometimes get rowdy.
From Salon ● Jun. 13, 2026
These Knicks don’t exude any of their hometown’s rowdy, center-of-the-planet arrogance.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 8, 2026
And if things get a bit rowdy and you think you'll get some resistance to saying goodbye, then you can do an Irish exit and slip away quietly.
From BBC ● Jun. 7, 2026
To her right were more old cells, but light poured into the tunnel from staggered archways on the left, and through them she glimpsed a roaring, rowdy crowd.
From "Six of Crows" by Leigh Bardugo
On an August night in the same year, rowdies racing a big red car through downtown scattered pedestrians, and half a dozen policemen “tried in vain to stop it.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 8, 2022
The vast majority of fraternity members are not the drunk rowdies characterized by the movie “Animal House”; in fact, they are serious students and well-behaved gentlemen.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 29, 2021
The other idols of those prelapsarian Mets, the rowdies who won it all in ’86, remain staples of New York media, their successes lionized and their sins reconstrued as locker-room foibles.
From Slate ● Jan. 12, 2020
Past "Fast and Furious" rowdies such as Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and Sung Kang join Diesel and company for an "Ocean's Eleven"-style heist romp.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 27, 2011
Carpenter recruited his gang at the saloon, rowdies all.
From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead
But there was far less focus on the even rowdier world of “dating” shows aimed at young men.
From Salon ● Nov. 21, 2025
The temperature in the 40s might have kept the bees from getting rowdier during the several hours it took to get the truck upright and removed by a tow truck, he said.
From Seattle Times ● May 10, 2024
Mr. Paden didn’t mind — a crowd is a crowd — though sometimes he seemed to miss the rowdier old days.
From New York Times ● Jan. 12, 2024
“There’s all the time in the world to partake in those activities during her rowdier, more up-tempo numbers but during her sacred ballads just shut up and listen,” a third commenter wrote.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 17, 2023
The men are getting rowdier; more than half are on their feet.
From "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen
Nebraska’s arena has become one of the rowdiest barns in the Big Ten.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026
Should the Marlins need a tip or two on how to win a postseason game in Philadelphia in front of one of the loudest, rowdiest atmospheres in baseball, they can just ask their manager.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 2, 2023
Running back Travis Dye, who twice played in Corvallis with Oregon, said he thought that it was “one of the rowdiest crowds Oregon State has ever come with.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 25, 2022
The WestJet Flight Deck, a center field standing room area for the rowdiest fans, was reduced to a maximum of six socially distanced people at a time.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 31, 2021
Among the rowdiest people of all were gangs of boys, teenaged and younger, who at last had their chance to defy authority.
From "1919 The Year That Changed America" by Martin W. Sandler
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.
