Other forms: bloated, bloating
To bloat is to swell up with gas or liquid. Feel bloated, bloating after meals, a bloated corpse.
In the gut it is gas and it is one of the commonest digestive complaints, usually harmless and occasionally not. Figuratively bloat means unnecessary size: software bloat, a bloated bureaucracy — the sense that something has grown without gaining anything. Note bloater, a smoked herring, which is the same swelling.
1verbbloatTo swell up with gas or liquid.
“The dead fish had bloated in the sun and floated on the water.”
2noununnecessaryUnnecessary size or complication.
“Each update adds more bloat, and now the app takes ages to open.”
bloat is a swelling.
Probably from Old Norse blautr, soft or soaked, through a Middle English word meaning soft. The sense of swelling came later.
Old Norse
blautr — soft
Middle English
blot
English, today
bloat
Built from
Perhaps from Middle English blot, blout (“soft; flexible; pliable”), from Old Norse blautr (“soft”). Akin to Danish blød, Dutch bloot (“nude”) and German bloß (“nude”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire