belly

From Middle English bely, beli, bali, below, belew, balyw, from Old English bielġ (“bag, pouch, bulge”), from Proto-West Germanic *balgi, *balgu, from Proto-Germanic *balgiz, *balguz (“skin, hide, bellows, bag”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰelǵʰ- (“to swell, blow up”). Cognate with Dutch balg, German Balg, Danish bælg, Old Irish bolg, Welsh bol. Doublet of bellows, blague, bulge, and budge. See also bellows.

• IPA^(key): /ˈbɛli/

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• Rhymes: -ɛli
• Hyphenation: bel‧ly

belly (plural bellies)

1. The abdomen, especially a fat one.

   You've grown a belly over Christmas! Time to join the gym again.

2. The stomach.

   My belly was full of wine.

3. The womb.
   • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Jeremiah 1:5:

     Before I formed thee in the bellie, I knew thee; […]

4. The lower fuselage of an airplane.
   • 1994, Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London: Abacus, published 2010, page 454:

     There was no heat, and we shivered in the belly of the plane.

5. The part of anything which resembles (either closely or abstractly) the human belly in protuberance or in concavity; often, the fundus (innermost part).

   the belly of a flask, muscle, violin, sail, or ship

   • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Jonah 2:2:

     […] I cried by reason of mine affliction vnto the Lord, and hee heard mee; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voyce.

   • 1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London, Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC:

     At last I got my knife and cut the halyards. The peak dropped instantly, a great belly of loose canvas floated broad upon the water […]

   1. The main curved portion of a knife blade.
   2. (architecture) The hollow part of a curved or bent timber, the convex part of which is the back.

• Formerly, all the splanchnic or visceral cavities were called bellies: the lower belly being the abdomen; the middle belly, the thorax; and the upper belly, the head.

• Sranan Tongo: bere

• abdomen
• bouk
• have eyes bigger than one's belly
• midriff
• stomach
• tummy

belly (third-person singular simple present bellies, present participle bellying, simple past and past participle bellied)

1. To position one’s belly; to move on one’s belly.
   • 1903 July, Jack London, “The Sounding of the Call”, in The Call of the Wild, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, page 220:

     Bellying forward to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with arrows like a porcupine.

2. (intransitive) To swell and become protuberant; to bulge or billow.
   • 1700, [John] Dryden, “Homer’s Ilias”, in Fables Ancient and Modern; […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, book I, page 213:

     The Pow'r appeaſ'd, with Winds ſuffic'd the Sail, / The bellying Canvaſs ſtrutted with the Gale; […]

   • 1890, Rudyard Kipling, The Rhyme of the Three Captains‎:

     The halliards twanged against the tops, the bunting bellied broad,

   • 1914, Theodore Roosevelt, chapter 6, in Through the Brazilian Wilderness‎:

     There were trees whose trunks bellied into huge swellings.

   • 1917 rev. 1925 Ezra Pound, "Canto I"

     winds from sternward

     Bore us onward with bellying canvas ...

   • 1930, Otis Adelbert Kline, The Prince of Peril, serialized in Argosy, Chapter 1,

     The building stood on a circular foundation, and its walls, instead of mounting skyward in a straight line, bellied outward and then curved in again at the top.

3. (transitive) To cause to swell out; to fill.
   • c. 1602, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ii]:

     Your breath of full consent bellied his sails; […]

   • 1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter I, in Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, →OCLC:

     A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.

• bellying
• belly out
• belly up