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!
February
4 years ago
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??
ReplyDeletekeiko
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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".