What Is a Bogey in Golf? Plus Double and Triple Bogeys

Golf scoring runs on a single reference point: par, the number of strokes an expert is expected to need on a hole. Every other scoring term is just a measure of how far above or below that mark you finished. Bogey is the most common of those terms for everyday golfers, because for most people playing a hole in one over par is a genuinely solid outcome.

Bogey defined

A bogey is a score of one stroke over par. Sink your ball in 5 shots on a par-4, and you have made a bogey. Take 4 on a par-3, same thing. It sits one rung below par on the scoring ladder.

For a professional, a bogey is a dropped shot, something to grind to avoid. For the millions of golfers who play for fun, a bogey is often the goal on a tough hole, and a round full of them is a respectable day.

Where the word comes from

The term predates most of golf’s other scoring language. In late 19th-century Britain, the “bogey score” was a standard target for a good amateur, informally linked to a popular song of the era about an elusive character called the Bogey Man. As equipment improved and the concept of “par” for a top expert took hold, par became the tougher benchmark and bogey slipped to mean one worse than par. The name stuck.

Bogey in the full scoring family

To place bogey in context, here is the standard scale relative to par:

Term	Strokes relative to par	Example on a par-4
Albatross (double eagle)	3 under	1
Eagle	2 under	2
Birdie	1 under	3
Par	Even	4
Bogey	1 over	5
Double bogey	2 over	6
Triple bogey	3 over	7

Anything worse than a triple bogey is usually just described by the number over par, such as “four over on the hole,” rather than a named term.

Double and triple bogeys

A double bogey is two strokes over par (a 6 on a par-4), and a triple bogey is three over (a 7 on a par-4). These are the scores that quietly wreck a good round. A single bad hole with a triple bogey can undo three well-earned pars, which is why course-management advice for improving golfers often focuses less on making birdies and more on avoiding the big numbers.

Many casual competitions cap the damage with a rule that stops you counting past a certain score, precisely because a runaway hole can otherwise ruin the whole card.

The bogey golfer

In handicapping, the “bogey golfer” is a defined benchmark: a player who averages about one over par per hole, shooting roughly 90 on a par-72 course. Course difficulty ratings are partly built around how a scratch golfer and a bogey golfer would each fare, so the term is baked into the way handicaps get calculated.

For most people picking up the game, stringing together bogeys is a milestone worth celebrating. It means you are getting round every hole in a controlled number of shots, which is the real foundation of lower scoring later on.