woozyadj.

1897 Voice (N.Y.) 22 Apr. 3/2 In the woozy lexicon of the voting church there is no such word as power.

1909 ‘O. Henry’ Roads of Destiny iv. 64 A woman gets woozy on clothes.

1915 P. G. Wodehouse Psmith, Journalist xvi. 114 ‘He's still woozy,’ said the Kid. ‘Still—what exactly, Comrade Brady?’ ‘In the air,’ explained the Kid. ‘Bats in the belfry. Dizzy.’

1917 A. Conan Doyle His Last Bow viii. 292 The man was mad. Well, he went a bit woozy.

1929 R. Kipling Limits & Renewals (1932) 356 He had kept himself going on rum sometimes, and was woozy when the pinch came.

1937 Black Mask Jan. 24/2 I got hit. It made me woozey for a minute.

1952 B. Malamud Natural 17 He got up whoozy and walked, finding it hard to believe his eyes.

1961 J. B. Priestley Saturn over Water iii. 29 The woozy state I was in.

1977 M. Hinxman One-way Cemetery xix. 139 He'd have phrased it more delicately if he hadn't felt quite so whoosy.

1978 Daily Tel. 17 Jan. 17/2 Liquid lunches can leave a man weak and woozy late in the afternoon, drinkers were told.

1941 W. H. Auden New Year Let. ii. 37 All vague idealistic art..Is up his alley, and his pigeon The woozier species of religion.

1961 Catholic Gaz. May 129/2 To Dickens, Christmas meant a debauch of vague and woozy sentiment.

1970 W. H. Auden in New Yorker 21 Feb. 118/1 Like Ruskin, he can at times write sentences which I would call ‘woozy’; that is to say, too dependent upon some private symbolism of his own to be altogether comprehensible to others.

1971 Daily Tel. 15 Mar. 13/4 One wonders if it is not simply the drink that has made so many Irish writers bury their poetic insights beneath so much that is garrulous, maudlin and whoozy.

1975 New Yorker 3 Feb. 84/2 There are gaps in the plot and woozy lapses in time.

1977 Rolling Stone 24 Mar. 41/2 She supports the old male stereotype of woman as overwhelmingly physical, instinctual, and her writing is too woozy for me.

1977 N.Y. Rev. Bks. 9 June 16/3 The other poem of 1939 [by Auden], with its ‘affirming flame’, is woozy too.

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 25 Apr. 470/5 A level of woozy tautology.

a1911 D. G. Phillips Susan Lenox (1917) I. xxi. 395 ‘Shut up!’ cried the drunken man... He caught them each by an arm, stared woozily at Etla.

1937 Black Mask Jan. 23/2 I shook my head woozily.

1967 Listener 9 Feb. 193/2 Staring woozily at a wine flask.

1924 Black Mask Nov. 48/2 This thing had fallen on me while my nerves were ragged from three days of boozing... [Now] my wooziness had passed.

1937 W. H. Auden Let. in W. H. Auden & L. MacNeice Lett. from Iceland 221 Landscape's so dull if you haven't Lawrence's wonderful wooziness.

1977 C. Isherwood Christopher & his Kind xii. 181 Much of what Christopher called Wystan's wooziness was essentially religious in context.

1984 Observer 19 Feb. 25/5 Later in life she more stubbornly shut herself off from the world's demands behind the defences of deafness, bad English and Benedictine-fuelled wooziness.