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What does “boeman” mean in Dutch?

Every Dutch child knows de boeman — the cloaked, fang-bearing figure who takes away children who misbehave or will not sleep. The word is a direct parallel to the English bogeyman, but its Dutch form is compact and vivid: boeman, literally a scare-man. In the clip, one line delivers it perfectly: the princess has been kidnapped, and the answer to Door wie? — By whom? — is simply: de boeman.

The word belongs to a wide Indo-European family of scare-figure names — Scots bogle, German Butzemann, Norwegian busemann, Welsh bwgan — all rooted in a shared instinct to give the dark something to call itself. In Dutch, de boeman is always masculine and always threatening, but he operates on a domestic scale: he hides under beds, he lurks near water, and he comes for children who will not behave. The phrase door de boeman (by the bogeyman) uses the preposition door to mark the agent — the same construction as door de regen (“by the rain”) or door haar vader (“by her father”) — making this a grammar point hiding inside a spooky story.