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say it: KOW-boy
cowboy is a noun meaning "a hired hand who tends cattle and performs other duties on horseback". It is pronounced /ˈkaʊˌbɔɪ/ — KOW-boy. It carries 3 recorded senses.
a hired hand who tends cattle and performs other duties on horseback
a performer who gives exhibitions of riding and roping and bulldogging
someone who is reckless or irresponsible (especially in driving vehicles)
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for cowboy come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.