belch
pronunciation
How to pronounce belch in British English:
UK [beltʃ]
How to pronounce belch in American English:
US [bɛltʃ]
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- Noun:
- a reflex that expels wind noisily from the stomach through the mouth
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- Verb:
- expel gas from the stomach
- become active and spew forth lava and rocks
Word Origin
- belch
- belch: [OE] Belch first appears in recognizable form in the 15th century, but it can scarcely not be related to belk ‘eructate’, which goes back to Old English bealcan and survived dialectally into the modern English period. Belch itself may derive either from an unrecorded variant of bealcan, *belcan (with the c here representing a /ch/ sound), or from a related Old English verb belcettan ‘eructate’.But whichever route it took, its ultimate source was probably a Germanic base *balk-or *belk-, from which German got bölken ‘bleat, low, belch’. Belch was originally a perfectly inoffensive word; it does not seem to have been until the 17th century that its associations began to drag it down towards vulgarity.
- belch (v.)
- Old English bealcan "bring up wind from the stomach," also "swell, heave," of echoic origin (cognates: Dutch balken "to bray, shout"). Extended to volcanoes, cannons, etc. 1570s. Related: Belched; belching. As a noun, recorded from 1510s. It is recorded in 1706 as a slang noun meaning "poor beer."
Example
- 1. The way you people talk , belch , indulge in your orgies of savory fats .
- 2. In kuala lumpur , cars belch fumes in barely moving traffic jams because no government has yet built a metro system .
- 3. A relatively small unit attached to the smokestack at the mountaineer power plant in west virginia is capturing some 1.5 percent of the carbon dioxide the coal-fired plant would otherwise belch into the sky .
- 4. He was part of a geological research cruise off the coast of costa rica , which aimed to study methane seeps - sites on the ocean floor that belch out methane and hydrogen sulphide gas .
- 5. Iris ( an orangutan ) began " belch vocalizing " - an unhappy / upset noise normally reserved for extreme irritation-before the quake and continued this vocalization following the quake .