Boggin'
Disgusting. Filthy. Awful. Used for things, places, and situations that the speaker finds unpleasant: a boggin' kitchen, a boggin' fish supper, a boggin' day at work. Adjective only, almost always with the apostrophe-truncated final 'g'.
Etymology
From the noun 'bog' (= marshy wet land), with the present-participle suffix '-in' applied to make an adjective. The image is of something that resembles a bog - wet, smelly, unpleasant, hard to walk through. The truncated '-in' rather than '-ing' is the Ulster pronunciation that the spelling preserves.
In a sentence
"The state of the bus - boggin' from front to back, somebody had been sick."
Historical notes
Boggin' is the Belfast and wider Ulster word for disgusting in the casual-conversation register. It does the same work as 'gross', 'mingin', or 'rank' elsewhere in informal English; the Belfast form has a sharper edge and a particular Northern register. The word is now common in younger Northern Ireland speech and travels south of the border with the speaker; in the Republic 'boggin'' usually marks a Northerner.
Sources
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary