nauseous

UK/ˈnɔːziːəs/US/ˈnɔʃəs/

adjectiveB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,751 of 15,258mostly spoken

Nauseous means feeling as though you are about to be sick. Feel nauseous, nauseous with fear, a nauseous smell.

Purists insisted for years that nauseous means causing nausea and nauseated means feeling it, so that saying you feel nauseous meant you make others ill. That battle is lost and both senses are standard. The Greek naus means a ship, so nausea is seasickness.

Definitions of nauseous

1adjectivenauseousFeeling as though you are about to be sick.B2
“The boat trip made me feel nauseous, so I stood at the back and watched the horizon.”

nauseous is a state of feeling.

Where it comes from

Latin nauseosus comes from nausea, from Greek naus, a ship. The word originally meant seasickness.

Latin
nauseōsus — causing nausea
English, today
nauseous

From Latin nauseōsus (“causing nausea”), corresponding synchronically to nausea + -ous.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

nauseous in the wild

Whenever Filburt feels uncomfortable or disturbed, he is known to say, "I'm nauseous!
Filburt
Residents across the island reported feeling nauseous and ill from the release of fumes.
Hovensa
The mushroom has a strong odor that has been described variously as "sweet and nauseous", or compared to an old ham bone, or soap.
Amanita daucipes
The film critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Ernst's painting "downright nauseous" and wrote that it "looks like a bad boiled lobster".
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Ernst)

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.

Related words

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