bones, dice. A Woman never vext, i. 1 (Stephen). A common expression.
bonfacion, of good fashion, fashionable. Three Ladies of London; in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, vi. 251, 311.
bongrace, a shade worn on the front of a woman’s bonnet as a protection from the sun. Heywood, Rape of Lucrece, iii. 4 (Song). F. ‘bonnegrace, the uppermost flap of the downhanging taile of a French hood; whence belike our Boongrace’ (Cotgr.).
bonnibell, a fair lass. Spenser, Shep. Kal., August, 62; B. Jonson, The Satyr, l. 21. From F. bonne et belle, good and fair girl. See [bellibone].
bonny-clabber, sour buttermilk. B. Jonson, New Inn, i. 1 (Host); Ford, Perkin Warbeck, iii. 2. 8. ‘Bonny-clabber’ in Ireland means thick milk. Irish bainne [pronounc. bonny], milk, and clabair, anything thick or half-liquid. In use in the United States wherever Irishmen forgather. See Joyce, English in Ireland, 219.
bookholder, a prompter in a theatre. B. Jonson, Barth. Fair, Induct.
books: phr. to be in a person’s books; ‘I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books’, Much Ado, i. 1. 179 (the probable meaning is, he is not in favour, not in the lady’s ‘book of memory’, 1 Hen. VI, ii. 4. 101).
boon, good; esp. in French phrases. ‘On a boon voyage’, Conflict of Conscience; in Hazlitt’s Dodsley, vi. 63. ‘Nature boon’, Milton, P. L. iv. 242; cp. ix. 793.
boord, bord; see [board], and [bourd].
boot-carouse, a carousing out of a bombard or black-jack, which was likened to a boot. Marston, Sat., ii. 154.