bile

Etymology

It is borrowed from French bile,^{[2][3][4][5][6]} from Latin bīlis (“bile; anger”),^[3][5][7] which in old medicine was also one of the four humours, called choler.^[3][8] Barnhart calls the French word a learned borrowing from Latin,^[5] and Etymonline notes that it was also used informally for "anger".^[3] The Latin word is of uncertain origin; it has cognates in British Celtic: Welsh bustl, Middle Cornish bystel and Breton bestl, all meaning gall or bile.^[3][7][5] Barnhart reconstructs Proto-Indo-European *bistlis,^[5] while Etymonline, citing de Vaan, notes that a word found only in Italic and Celtic may not be Indo-European at all, and that if it was borrowed from Celtic into Latin it might come from Proto-Indo-European *bheid- (“to split”), the root of bite, bile being "a biting substance".^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

The bitter fluid secreted by the liver: Merriam-Webster dates this sense to 1547,^[9] and the Shorter Oxford and the Oxford Dictionary of English to the mid 16th century.^[10][11] The OED's first quotation for it is from 1665,^[2][5] but it records the word earlier, in 1634, for black bile, the humour of melancholy.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The figurative sense "anger, bad temper, peevishness" comes from the old theory of the humours, in which an excess of bile was thought to cause bitterness of feeling.^[3][2] The OED records it in English from 1836,^[2] and the Shorter Oxford from the mid 19th century,^[10] although the adjective bilious already meant ill-tempered in 1561.^[5] Johnson (1755) defined bile only in physiological terms, as a yellow, bitter liquor separated in the liver and collected in the gall bladder.^[12] The phrase black bile is recorded from 1797,^[3] and since 1803 bile was also an excess or disorder of the bile.^[2][10]

Timeline

• 1547 – the fluid secreted by the liver.^[9] The OED's first quotation for this sense is from 1665.^[2][5]
• 1634 – black bile, the humour of melancholy.^[2]
• 1797 – the phrase black bile.^[3]
• 1803 – an excess or disorder of the bile.^[2]
• 1836 – anger, ill temper, peevishness.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. A bitter, yellowish-green to brown alkaline fluid produced by the liver and stored in the gall bladder, which passes into the duodenum and helps the body digest and absorb fats.^[13][9][2]
2. Irritability, bad temper or bitterness: Her review was written with real bile.^[13][2]
3. An excess or disorder of the bile; biliousness.^[2][10]
4. (archaic) Either of two humours of early physiology, yellow bile (choler) or black bile (melancholy).^[13][2][10]

Word family

• bilestone
• atrabilious
• biliary
• bilious
• bilirubin
• bile duct
• black bile
• yellow bile

Usage notes

Merriam-Webster also records bile as a dialect form of boil, both the noun for a sore, from Old English bȳl, and the verb.^[9] In Aberdeenshire a bile was a heating of corn-stacks, and in Galloway a bile in the stomach was a bilious attack.^[14]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
5. ^ a b c d e f g h Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
6. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
8. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
9. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
10. ^ a b c d e Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
12. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
13. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
14. ^ Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898–1905), The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., Oxford: Henry Frowde; via EDD Online 4.0, University of Innsbruck (CC BY 4.0)