To ask what bonny means when describing a baby?

[Oysterbabe]

I'd never heard it before having kids. Everyone keeps telling me DD is bonny. I'm not 100% on what it means. Does it mean fat?
She does have lovely chubby cheeks and thighs that you just can't help but squidge.

Pretty!

Bonny for me is a "good doer"- a child who is thriving in the old fashioned sense, so appears to be healthy and eating well.

So yes, it means a bit chubby.

It's definitely a complement! Cute, healthy, chubby, engaging.

I always thought it was happy and smiley

To put it in context, it's a hangover from the days when working class people were very thin, so if your child was well-padded, you could be proud because it meant you fed them well.

My FIL, born mid-1920s, won a bonny baby competition. You should see the photo: a whale that would have drawn the attention of the social services these days. He died of a heart attack in his early 60s, being massive in his old age. This attitude was visited on my DH in the form of over-feeding: also a fat kid, also heart problems.

Not suggesting your child is a behemoth, OP, just giving the historical context and its aftermath.

Bonny can mean fat in the North West but in relation to a baby tends to just mean thriving, looking healthy etc.

She does have a chin or two.

Pretty/beautiful.

My sister won a lot of bonny baby competitions (ginger ringlets and big Green eyes, I think) and she was never anywhere near fat. She remains the slimmest baby I've ever seen! People used to joke that I needed to feed her. Or that our older sister must have eaten her food, which seemed funny at the time but is quite a mean thing to say as an adult!

Nah, she's fine, with chubby baby cheeks; not in the slightest like my poor FIL.

Here it means beautiful, cute, it's a compliment definitely.

Bonny = good looking.

Chubby babies are the bonniest IMO.

She is bonny OP

Chubby-cheeked, cheerful and cute!

I think it's used mostly nowadays to mean cute/pretty but in days of yore definitely a euphemism for a chubster. But as pp say, because chubby = full of nutrition until about 40 years ago. Opposite of scrawny, which had connotations of malnourished.

Aww but your dd is a (genuine) cutie!

And the child that was born on the Sabbath day wil be bonnie and blithe and good and gay.

All good things (obviously wriiten when gay meant happy, not that there's anything wrong with gay).

My DM would have said that it meant pretty, but she only ever used it with babies who were a bit chubby! Babies and small children of the correct weight were dismissed as 'scrawny'.

I think it means healthy looking!

This comes up every couple of months about adults. With babies, it's pretty unproblematic - it's a compliment, meaning the baby is cute and plump and all round adorable. I don't think 'bonny' would be used of a baby who was as cute as yours, OP, but who was a tiny, thin, fragile-looking slip of a thing.

Who would be no less 'cute', but almost certainly wouldn't be described as 'bonny', especially not by an older person for whom a slender baby, even in the pink of health, suggests fragility/sickliness.

Yours is seriously cute, OP. Revel in the compliments.

Happy!

I've never heard of bonny being fat just used to describe someone whose really beautiful and a real cracker! X

Awwww she is adorable!

Bonnie is definitely beautiful, but in a healthy, rosy cheeked way, rather than frail and ethereal!

For Gaelic types, it means 'pretty'. For me, it means pretty/healthy/glowing.

In scotland it means beautiful. . Definitely not fat.
Bonnie Scotland