bo liao
- adjective
- Slang
:
aburrido
- I felt so bo liao during the meeting that I started doodling instead of paying attention.
Examples
-
Whenever I'm bo liao, I scroll endlessly through social media.
-
His jokes were so bo liao that everyone stopped paying attention.
-
She told me she was bo liao and wanted to do something fun.
-
This movie is so bo liao!
-
I feel really bo liao today.
-
Whenever I am bo liao, I like to go out and try a new café with friends.
-
That lecture was so bo liao that half the class fell asleep.
Synonyms
4
6.1
Feeling very uninterested and restless because nothing holds your attention
1
9.3
Feeling bored, tired, and not interested
1
9.9
Feeling very tired of something and not interested at all
Antonyms
How Bored
Surface Forms
Morphology
bo + liao
Bo liao is Singlish/Hokkien slang whose parts ('bo' and 'liao') are not English words and have no dictionary definitions here, so an English B1 learner who only knows the constituent items in English would have no basis to infer the meaning. The expression is language-specific and idiomatic (its sense is predictable only to speakers familiar with Hokkien or Singlish), making it unpredictable from the parts and therefore opaque to most learners.
Etymology
Bo liao comes from a Chinese dialect phrase where bo means 'no' and liao means 'interest' or 'point'. People used it to say they had nothing to do or that something felt empty, so today bo liao means 'bored' or 'uninteresting'.