"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

Friday 2 March 2012

Borborygmus

   This is not a word one would normally come across but I just couldn't resist blogging it.  It has such a delightful sound - it's pronounced bor-buh-rig-muss.

Oh yes, It'd better give you its meaning as well.  It means a rumbling or gurgling sound caused by the movement of gas in the intestines.

The plural is borborygmi.

May you have no embarrassing borborygmi in the near future!

2 comments:

  1. Oh, this seems an interesting sound (although my dictionary does not have this word, so just I guess the pronunciation.) I would like to add this one to Japanese language as onomatopoe; there are countless onomatopoes in Japanese. I wonder whether this word cane be usded as a verb too??
    keiko

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  2. Hello Keiko - Borborygmus is related to the sixteenth-century French word borborygme, but goes further back into history with the Greek word borborugmos and you are right - the Greeks came across the word from its onomatopoeic value.

    I can't find a verb but there seems to be an adjective - In Ada, Vladimir Nabokov wrote: "All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions". In A Long Way Down (1959), Elizabeth Fenwick wrote: "The room was very quiet, except for its borborygmic old radiator".

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