flatulent

Etymology

It is borrowed from Middle French flatulent,^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]} which Etymonline dates to the 16th century,^[5] from New Latin flātulentus,^{[4][5][6][7][8]} from Latin flātus (“a blowing, a blast; a breaking wind”),^[4][5][2][3] the past participle of flō (“to blow, puff”),^[5][3][2] from Proto-Indo-European *bhle- (“to blow”).^[5] The ending is the suffix -ulent.^[4][6][7] Barnhart and Merriam-Webster Unabridged treat the French adjective as an irregular formation directly on the Latin noun,^[2][3] and Barnhart thinks it was probably patterned on virulent and succulent.^[2] Collins and Dictionary.com take the English word straight from the New Latin form.^[9][10]

Earliest recorded meaning

Causing gas in the alimentary canal: 1599, in H. Buttes's Dyets Dry Dinner.^[4][2][3]

Semantic evolution

From the Latin sense of blowing, the word was used in the 17th century of anything windy or full of air: the OED has this from 1600 to 1766, including tumours swollen with air.^[4] Johnson (1755) still put "turgid with air; windy" first, quoting Arbuthnot on peas and Quincy on flatulent tumours.^[11] Diseases attended by gas in the stomach and bowels were called flatulent from 1655, and people troubled by it only from 1732, in Arbuthnot.^[4] The figurative sense, puffed up, empty, pretentious, appeared in 1658, in F. Osborne's Advice to Son,^[4] and Johnson's second sense is "empty; vain; big without substance or reality; puffy", with Dryden's "flatulent writers".^[11] The noun flatulence shows the same two sides: Barnhart first finds it in 1711 for vanity and pomposity,^[2] while Hoad dates it to the 19th century and flatulency to the 17th.^[7]

Timeline

• 1599 – causing gas in the alimentary canal.^[4][2][3]
• 1600 – of a windy nature, full of air; of a tumour, swollen with air (obsolete by 1766).^[4]
• 1655 – of a disease, attended with or caused by gas in the alimentary canal.^[4]
• 1658 – figuratively, puffed up, empty, pretentious.^[4]
• 1671 – liable to windy blasts (rare).^[4]
• 1732 – of people, troubled with gas.^[4]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Suffering from, or caused by, too much gas in the stomach or intestine: He felt flatulent after the banquet.^[9][3][4]
2. Tending to produce such gas: Boiled cabbage can be a flatulent dish.^[9][3][4]
3. Pretentious and empty; windy or inflated in style: a flatulent after-dinner speech.^[9][3][6][4]
4. (obsolete, 1600–1766) Full of air or wind; turgid with air.^[4][11]

Word family

• flatulently
• flatulence
• nonflatulent

Related words

• flatus
• inflate
• deflate
• blow

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b c d Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
8. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
10. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
11. ^ a b c Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.