doss

I. vb

a.

to sleep

I need a place to doss for a couple of nights.

b.

to move from place to place, sleeping in borrowed or low-class accommodation

► 'Old Shawie's been dossing for the last three weeks.' (Recorded, London student, 1988)

c.

to relax, chill. A fashionable usage since 2000.

A 19th-century term which may derive from the Latin dorsum, for 'back'. The verb forms, as opposed to the noun forms of the word, are mainly encountered in British English.

II. n

1a.

a place to sleep, especially a tempo-rary, free and/or makeshift bed. This word, from 19th-century tramps' jargon, was probably originally a corruption of the Latin dorsum, for 'back'. Tramps are unlikely to have coined the term; it may have come from the jargon surrounding pugilism (meaning 'flat on one's back') which was a sport subscribed to by aris-tocrats and students, among others.

1b.

a period of sleep, a nap

2.

a very easy task, a pushover. In this sense the word, although based on the notion of lying down, may be influenced by 'toss', as in easily tossing off a piece of work.

You mustn't see this purely as a doss.