buss
Noun pluralbusses
Pluralbusses
- 1To kiss someone, either literally or in a figurative sense.
Like the way a breeze barely brushes the petals of a flower.
Sailors buss their sweethearts on the docks before the long voyage.
The morning breeze busses the petals of every open rose.
Note
The verb survives in poetry and dialect and takes a direct object. Shakespeare's King John has "busse thee as thy wife," and Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869) has "I bussed her well." Figuratively it can mean a light touch. In T. C. Boyle's Water Music (1982) an explorer stoops to buss the earth, and in Fiddlehead (2007) a tall man's head "bussed the ceiling."
- 2An act of kissing someone.
She left a buss upon his brow as he slept.
Here he gave Jones a hearty buss, shook him by the hand, and took his leave.
1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom JonesNote
An old word that sounds like what it names. It first turns up in the 1560s, and its ancestry is uncertain: it may come from a Germanic root for lip and kissing, kin to German bussen, but it is imitative of a kiss in any case. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) has Jones give "a hearty buss," and today the noun reads as deliberately old-fashioned.
- 3To kiss, coming together lip to lip in affection or greeting.
Beneath the old oak, the sweethearts bussed and then parted.
They buss each time they meet after a long absence.
Note
Without an object, the verb describes people kissing one another, so it pairs naturally with a plural subject. James Isaiah Gabbe's LaRue's Maneuvers (2007) has "they bussed and fondled." Compare the transitive verb, where one person busses another. The forms are shared, and the double s holds throughout: bussed, bussing.
- 4A shallow-keeled Dutch fishing boat, used especially for catching herring.
The painting showed a single buss riding low against the gray horizon.
Herring busses sailed in fleets, processing their catch onboard.
Note
A different word altogether, borrowed from Dutch buis and unrelated to the kissing buss. In full it is a herring buss. Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England pairs "the Dutch whalers and herring busses." Its plural, busses, is spelled exactly like the verb form for "he kisses," so let the fishing context do the work of telling them apart.
Less common meaning
- 5Archaic form of bus.
Crowds waited for the evening buss outside the depot.
A horse-drawn buss once rattled down these very streets.
Note
An old spelling of the passenger vehicle. Dickens uses it in Sketches by Boz (1838), backing his daily coach "against any buss on the road." The spelling belongs only to that vehicle, not to the electrical bus that links circuits or the slang bus for an ambulance. In modern writing use bus. The double s now collides with the archaic kiss.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origins
First attested in the 1560s and of uncertain origin, but in any case imitative of the sound of kissing. It may come from Proto-Indo-European *bʰus- ("lip, to kiss") via Proto-Germanic *busaną, and it has been compared with Welsh bus ("kiss, lip"), Irish bus ("lips, mouth"), and Latin basium ("kiss"); some also suggest it blends the dialect words bass and cuss.
From Dutch buis.