Other forms: blubbering
Blubber is the thick fat layer that keeps sea mammals warm. Whales, seals and walruses all carry it.
It is remarkably effective insulation, and it doubles as an energy store for animals that fast for months. Whaling existed almost entirely to render it into oil, which lit European cities for a century. There is an entirely separate informal verb, since to blubber is to cry noisily and unattractively, and blubbering is a dismissive way of describing somebody's tears. The two senses are unrelated in feeling if not in origin.
Blubber was bubbling. Middle English bluber meant a bubble, foaming water and whale oil all at once, and bloberen was to bubble or to seethe, so crying noisily and the fat of a whale come out of one word.
Middle English
bloberen
English, today
blubber
Built from
The verb is derived from Late Middle English bloberen, bluberen (“to bubble, seethe”); and the noun from Late Middle English blober, bluber (“bubble; bubbling water; foaming waves; fish or whale oil; entrails, intestines; (medicine) pustule”), both probably imitative of the sound, representing the movement or sound of a bubbling liquid, or the movement of lips forming bubbles (compare bleb and blob, thought to be similarly imitative). As both the verb and noun are attested in the 14th century, it is difficult to tell which one developed first; the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the noun may be derived from the verb. Verb to swell through crying (“to cause (one’s face) to disfigure or swell through crying”) is influenced by blubber (adjective).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Insects & Sea Life
First appears in chapter 17 of A Man Called Ove.
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