7/23/2023 0 Comments Nauseous vs nauseatedMerriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives “nauseous” two meanings: “1. Standard dictionaries agree-though not all of them state the case so strongly. In current use it seldom means anything else.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says flatly, “Any handbook that tells you that nauseous cannot mean ‘nauseated’ is out of touch with the contemporary language. Williams, written sometime before 1759: “The nauseated reader, no longer cou’d brook The hoarse cuckow note.”Īnd that has been the meaning of “nauseated” ever since-or has it?Īs you can see, “nauseous” and “nauseated” have had bumpy rides. The meaning later shifted to “suffering from or characterized by nausea,” as in this citation from the works of Sir Charles H. The OED’s first citation for the use of the word in writing is from Richard Allestree’s book The Gentlemans Calling (1660): “Forsaking all the unsatisfying nauseated pleasures of Luxury.” In other words, it meant pretty much what sticklers now insist “nauseous” should mean. When it was first used, in the 17th century, “nauseated” meant “causing nausea, cloying, rank,” the OED says. Meanwhile, “nauseated” was undergoing some changes of its own. The OED’s earliest citation for this usage is from 1885, and the numerous examples continue into the year 2000.Ī representative example is this one from a 1949 issue of the Saturday Review: “After taking dramamine, not only did the woman’s hives clear up, but she discovered that her usual trolley ride back home no longer made her nauseous.” In the late 19th century, however, two senses of “nauseous” similar to the early ones showed up in the US: “affected with nausea having an unsettled stomach,” and “disgusted, affected with distaste or loathing.” Later in the 1600s, figurative meanings of “nauseous” came along, and it was used to mean nasty, repellant, loathsome, disgusting, repulsive, or offensive. offensive or unpleasant to taste or smell.” But before it died out, it overlapped with another, first recorded in 1618, defined by the OED as “causing nausea,” and “in later use: esp. The original sense of “nauseous” has since become obsolete. That, of course, is a somewhat milder version of the meaning that makes you sick: about to throw up. The earlier of the adjectives, “nauseous,” was first recorded in 1613, according to the OED, and it originally meant “inclined to sickness or nausea squeamish.” These are still the meanings the noun “nausea” has today. In the 17th century, the OED says, “nausea” came to have figurative meanings like “strong disgust, loathing, or aversion,” or “a feeling of this.” The Ox ford English Dictionary defines this early meaning as “a feeling of sickness with an inclination to vomit an occurrence of such a feeling.” (It was later used to mean seasickness too.) “Nausea” came into English from Latin in the early to mid-1400s, and while the Latin word meant seasickness, the English word had a more general meaning. Through Greek and later Latin, that Indo-European root is the distant ancestor of such seafaring English words “nautical,” “nautilus,” “navy,” “naval,” “navigation,” and of course “nausea,” according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. The seasickness angle is significant, since the Greek nausie and nautia were derived from nautes (sailor), which in turn came from naus (ship).Īll these words share an ancestor, a prehistoric Indo-European word reconstructed as nau (“boat”), according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. The word passed into Latin, in which nausea means seasickness. The root word here, “nausea,” ultimately comes from ancient Greece, in which nausie (in Ionic Greek) and nautia (in Attic Greek) meant seasickness, sickness, disgust, or loathing. These are interesting words with a tangled history. So your daughter might want to pause before correcting anyone. Never say, ‘I’m nauseous.’ Even if it’s true, why admit it?”īut in the six years since we wrote that post, the sands of English usage have been shifting. If something is sickening, it’s nauseous. In a posting we ran on our blog in 2006, we said: “If someone is sick to his stomach, he’s nauseated. In fact, it was even less so when they entered English hundreds of years ago. Now, a new issue: in teaching her med students, should she insist they get it right?Ī: We assume you passed on to your daughter the traditional view-that “nauseous” means sickening while “nauseated” means sickened.īut the distinction between these two words is becoming less distinct year by year. Q: I worked on my daughter for 20 years to distinguish “nauseous” and “nauseated.” Finally, after graduating from med school, she spoke correctly.
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