Wiktionary

bilious

English edit

WOTD – 27 March 2010

Etymology edit

From French bilieux, from Latin bīliōsus (“full of bile”), from bīlis (“bile”) + -ōsus (“full of”).

Pronunciation edit

Adjective edit

bilious (comparative more bilious, superlative most bilious)

  1. Of or pertaining to something containing or consisting of bile.
  2. Resembling bile, especially in color.
    • 1820, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot The Tyrant: A Tragedy in Two Acts:
      Does money fail?—come to my mint—coin paper,
      Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed
      To show his bilious face, go purge himself,
      In emulation of her vestal whiteness.
    • 1845, Alexandre Dumas, chapter 31, in Twenty Years After:
      His complexion was pale, not of that deadly pallor which is a kind of neutral beauty, but of a bilious, yellow hue; his colorless hair was short and scarcely extended beyond the circle formed by the hat around his head, and his light blue eyes seemed destitute of any expression.
    • 1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 3, in Main Street:
      The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow.
    • 1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, prologue:
      A beautiful girl once told me of a recurring nightmare in which she lay in the center of a large dark room and felt her face expand until it filled the whole room, becoming a formless mass while her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney.
  3. (pathology) Suffering from real or supposed liver disorder, especially excessive secretions of bile.
    • 1815, Jane Austen, Emma, volume II, chapter 7:
      Perry tells me that Mr. Cole never touches malt liquor. You would not think it to look at him, but he is bilious—Mr. Cole is very bilious.
  4. Peevishly ill-humored, irritable or bad tempered; irascible.
    • 1830 January, Thomas Macaulay, “[Review of] Southey's Colloquies on Society”, in The Edinburgh Review, page 536:
      The glorified spirit of a great statesman and philosopher dawdling, like a bilious old Nabob at a watering-place, over quarterly reviews and novels—dropping in to pay long calls—making excursions in search of the picturesque!
    • 1934, George Orwell, Burmese Days:
      The boarders, sharp-tongued bilious widows, pursued the only man in the establishment, a mild, bald creature who worked in La Samaritaine […]

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