bony
/ˈbəʊni
/adjective (bonier, boniest)
1Of or like bone: the bony plates that protect turtles and tortoises...
- Dermal bone consists of bony structures (plates and scales) that develop in the skin.
- The dome of the skull, for example, is made of bony plates, which must be immovable to protect the brain.
- The bony plates on the armadillos' back serves as protective armour from predators.
1.1(Of a fish eaten as food) having many bones.Steamed fish or bony kippers don't feature much in today's childhood diets....
- Their diet consists primarily of bony fishes and small sharks, including young bull sharks, but they have been known to feast on everything from seabirds to dogs.
- For the most part, bull sharks dine on bony fishes or smaller sharks - but they sometimes aggressively tackle much larger prey.
1.2(Of a person or part of the body) so thin that the bones can be seen: he held up his bony fingers...
- One by one, shadowy, transparent figures of skinny, bony people appeared all around.
- The bony woman waved one gangly arm at another set of double doors that Sam hadn't noticed before.
- For I wasn't even really there, just a bit of my mind was left in my bony body.
Synonyms
gaunt, angular, hollow-cheeked, skinny, thin, thin as a rake, lean, spare, raw-boned, skin-and-bones, skeletal, cadaverous, size-zero;
underfed, underweight, half-starved, emaciated, fleshless;
rangy, gangly, gangling, spindly, scraggy, scrawny
informal anorexic, anorectic, like a bag of bones
dated spindle-shanked
rare gracile, macilent, starveling
Derivatives
boniness
- It is an uncomfortable feeling to find in her sickness the conventions of beauty - boniness and pallor.
- The critic recently slammed her ‘obscene’ boniness, which she felt cynically exploited real-life victims of famine, illness and genocide.
- Somehow his boniness and gauntness extends to his personality.