bosser

boss +‎ -er?

bosser (plural bossers)

1. (rare) A bossy person, one who orders others around.
   • 1985, Gertrude Story, The Need of Wanting Always, page 160:

     They were all bossers here. Especially the women. They were bossy even when they deared her.

2. (UK, dialect) A large marble in children's games.
   • 1953, Arthur Beckett, The Sussex County Magazine, volume 27, page 60:

     […] the ultimate winner is the man with the greatest number of marbles when play comes to an end. The games at Battle at the present time are played with glass marbles and locally made “bossers” of concrete.

   • 1997, Iona Archibald Opie, Peter Opie, Children's games with things, page 54:

     Modern children, having only machine-made glass marbles, are restricted to names describing their size, or the names under which they are sold, or fanciful names of their own inventing. Thus big marbles are big 'uns, bossers, bulls or bullies […]

3. An instrument used to push clay into a mold.

• Bosers, Sobers, broses, sobers

bosser ?

1. (Sauris) water

• Umberto Patuzzi, ed., (2013) Ünsarne Börtar, Luserna: Comitato unitario delle linguistiche storiche germaniche in Italia / Einheitskomitee der historischen deutschen Sprachinseln in Italien.

• IPA^(key): /bɔ.se/

First attested in 1878.

Probably from bosse +‎ -er (see below) with some sort of semantic shift. It has been suggested that in western France, the verb came to mean "to bend over for work"; alternately, that sailors raising an anchor was considered typical "hard work", or that the word came from the sense of "to emboss" and was originally cant used by artisans.

bosser

1. (France, slang) to work (to do a task)

   Synonym: travailler

From bosse +‎ -er; cf. bossoir.

bosser (transitive)

1. to emboss
2. to dent; to cause a dent
3. (nautical) to raise an anchor over the davit(s)

• “bosser”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.
• “bosser” in Dictionnaire français en ligne Larousse.

• brosse, brossé