Other forms: bouts
A bout is a short spell of something that takes hold of you and then passes. A bout of flu that keeps you in bed for a week; a bout of coughing at the back of the cinema; a bout of tidying that lasts one Saturday morning.
Bout nearly always takes OF, and what follows is nearly always unwelcome: a bout of illness, of depression, of drinking, of bad weather. It marks something with edges — it starts, it lasts a while, it stops — so nobody talks about a bout of childhood or a bout of marriage. The other bout is a fight: a boxing bout, a wrestling bout, twelve rounds between two named people. Older writing gives you the drinking bout, an evening of it, and the phrase 'the first bout', meaning the first go at something. When the period has no shape and no end in sight, the word you want is spell or phase.
1nounboutA short period of an illness, an activity, or a state, which starts and then ends.~70%
“A bout of flu kept him out of the office for a fortnight.”
2nounmatchA fight or contest, especially in boxing or wrestling.~30%
“The bout went the full twelve rounds.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
bout is a period of time.
Behind bout is a bend. Middle English bout goes back to an Old English word for a bend or a turn, from Proto-Germanic *buhtiz, 'a bend' — the same family as bow, and a cousin of bight, the curve in a coastline. A bout was one turn, one length of the field and back; from a turn at work it became a turn of fever, and then a turn in the ring.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰewgʰ-
Old English
*buht — bend, turn
Middle English
bout
English, today
bout
From Middle English bout, bowt, bught (whence also modern English bought (“bend, curve”)), probably from Old English buht (“bend, turn”), an unrecorded variant of Old English byht (“a bend, curve”), from Proto-West Germanic buhti, from Proto-Germanic buhtiz (“a bend”). Equivalent to bow + -t. a doublet of bight and bought. Compare Dutch bocht and German Bucht. For the sense development compare bender.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA