bulging

UK/ˈbʌldʒɪŋ/US/ˈbʌldʒɪŋ/

adjectiveB22 meanings Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,139 of 15,258neutral

Bulging means pushed outward from the inside, so a surface that was flat has swollen into a curve. The suitcase you had to sit on to close; the shopping bag with the corner of a cereal box poking through the side.

A bag, a pocket, a folder or a wallet is bulging when there is more in it than it was built to hold. Bodies bulge too: bulging muscles under a shirt, bulging eyes when somebody is astonished, and a bulging disc, which is a real diagnosis and a painful one. The verb is bulge — the wall bulged after the flood — and a bulge is the lump itself. Bulging is not simply big; it carries strain, the sense of something pressing out of shape. A bulging wallet is fat with receipts as easily as with money.

Definitions of bulging

1adjectivebulgingSwelling or curving outward because something inside pushes against the surface.B2~98%
“He hauled a bulging sack of potatoes onto the counter.”
synonyms: swollen, protruding
2adjectivebagOf a bag or container, so full that its sides are stretched.B2~2%
“She arrived with a bulging folder of paperwork under one arm.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Light & Shadow, Shapes & Lines

First appears in chapter 20 of A Man Called Ove.

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bulging in the wild

Attached to the southern rim are the co-joined craters Bonpland and Parry, which intrude into the formation forming inward-bulging walls.
Fra Mauro (crater)
The rim of this crater is not circular in form, having a bulging rim to the southeast.
Flamsteed (crater)
There is an equally worn crater lying across the northern rim, and Crommelin X is attached to the outward-bulging northwest perimeter.
Crommelin (lunar crater)
Within the better data for crime reporting and recording available starting in the 1930s, crime reached its broad, bulging modern peak between the 1970s and early 1990s.
Crime in the United States
Signs of AOM include bulging or a lack of movement of the tympanic membrane from a puff of air.
Otitis media

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Definitions of bulging

1adjectivebulgingSwelling or curving outward because something inside pushes against the surface.B2~98%

“He hauled a bulging sack of potatoes onto the counter.”

synonyms: swollen, protruding

2adjectivebagOf a bag or container, so full that its sides are stretched.B2~2%

“She arrived with a bulging folder of paperwork under one arm.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.