glut

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English glotien, also glotten and glutten,^[2] probably borrowed from Old French glotir (“to swallow, gulp down”), also gloutir,^{[3][4][5][6][7]} which is from Latin gluttiō (“to swallow, gulp down”).^[3][4][8][9] The Middle English Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary and Barnhart instead name Old French gloter and glotoiier (“to eat greedily”) as the source.^[2][8][9] The Shorter Oxford suggests that the causative sense "to feed full" may have developed in Anglo-Norman.^[6] The OED derives the verb probably from the obsolete English noun glut, a glutton, or from its Old French source glut (“greedy, gluttonous”),^[10] and Dictionary.com calls it a back-formation from Middle English glutun, glutton.^[11] The Latin verb is related to gula (“throat”),^[12][13] and Ayto and Klein trace the group to Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to swallow”).^[12][13] The noun comes from the verb.^{[10][3][6][4][9]}

Earliest recorded meaning

To feed to repletion, chiefly of oneself: about 1315, in the poems of Shoreham.^[10] Barnhart finds it in the form gloutinge, a feasting to excessive fullness, before 1333,^[9] and Etymonline dates it to the early 14th century.^[3]

Semantic evolution

The Middle English verb already ran from feeding someone full to eating to excess, and it had a figurative sense of surfeiting the heart; in alchemy it meant flooding the "matter" by adding to it too fast.^[2] Filling a vessel, channel or pipe to excess is recorded from 1471, in Ripley's Compound of Alchymy.^[10] By 1530 the verb could mean to overload or cloy with excess of anything.^[10] From 1549 it was used of gratifying a desire to the full, later especially a ferocious or lustful one.^[10] The commercial sense appears in 1624, in John Smith's history of Virginia, chiefly in to glut the market.^[10]

Etymonline dates "a gulp" to the 1530s and "the condition of being full" to the 1570s;^[3] the OED takes "a gulp" (1541) from Old French glout (“gulp”) rather than from the verb,^[10] and treats "swallow greedily" (1600) as a direct borrowing from French.^[10][6] Barnhart has "excessive flow" from 1579.^[9] The OED's first records of both a surfeit and an oversupply of a commodity are from 1594, in Plat's Jewell House,^[10] and Etymonline agrees on the 1590s for the mercantile sense.^[3] Johnson (1755) listed for the noun "that which is gorged or swallowed", "plenty even to loathing and satiety" and "more than enough; overmuch".^[14] Merriam-Webster Unabridged and the Concise Oxford mark the older uses of satiety as archaic.^[5][15] In Scots and English dialect the verb still meant to swallow, or to swallow at one gulp, in the 19th century.^[16]

Timeline

• c. 1315 – to feed to repletion.^[10]
• 1471 – to fill a vessel or channel to excess.^[10]
• 1530 – to overload or cloy with excess.^[10]
• 1541 – noun, a gulp or full draught.^[10] Etymonline dates it to the 1530s, and Merriam-Webster Unabridged has about 1546 for the noun's excessive quantity.^[3][5]
• 1549 – to gratify a desire or appetite to the full.^[10]
• 1579 – noun, an excessive flow.^[9]
• 1594 – noun, a surfeit; a supply of goods far beyond demand.^[10]
• 1600 – to swallow greedily, gulp down.^[10][5]
• 1624 – to overstock with goods, as in to glut the market.^[10]
• before 1637 – noun, an excessive influx of water or rain.^[10]
• 1850 – in the United States, a swarm of caterpillars attacking tobacco plants.^[10]

Meanings

Noun

1. A supply far greater than the demand, especially of a commodity, which often lowers its price: A glut of plums left growers with unsold fruit.^[7][5][10]
2. Any excessive quantity.^[7][5]
3. The act of glutting or the state of being glutted; a surfeit.^[7][5][10]
4. (archaic) A gulp or draught.^[5][10][6]

Verb

1. To feed or fill beyond capacity; to satiate: They glutted themselves on roast goose.^[7][5][10]
2. To gratify a desire or appetite to the fullest.^[5][10][15]
3. To supply a market with more goods than it demands.^[7][5][10]
4. To cram full or choke up a passage or channel.^[7][10]
5. (archaic) To swallow greedily.^[5][10][6]

Word family

• gluttingly
• overglut
• englut

Related words

• glutton
• gluttony
• gullet
• deglutition

Usage notes

The wedge called a glut (from 1790), used in splitting wood and in masonry, also a nautical term for a piece of canvas sewn into a square sail, is not derived from the verb in the dictionaries: the OED and the Shorter Oxford think it perhaps an altered form of a dialect variant of cleat, assimilated to this word,^[10][6] and Merriam-Webster Unabridged calls its origin unknown.^[5] In the English Midlands and East Anglia it is a dialect word for a large wooden wedge.^[16]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b c d e f g 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 e f g Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
8. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
9. ^ a b c d e f Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
10. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 27 28 29 Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
12. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
13. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
14. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
15. ^ a b Soanes, Catherine; Stevenson, Angus, eds. (2004), Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
16. ^ a b 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)