obese

adjective

ō-ˈbēs 

: having excessive body fat

Synonyms

• blubbery
• chubby
• corpulent
• fat
• fleshy
• full
• gross
• lardy
• overweight
• plump
• podgy [chiefly British]
• portly
• pudgy
• replete
• roly-poly
• rotund
• round
• tubby

Examples of obese in a Sentence

providing medical treatment for obese patients

the basset hound was so obese that its stomach touched the floor

Recent Examples on the Web

In the United States alone, more than 40 percent of adults are obese. —Eshe Nelson Charlotte De La Fuente, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2024

Among Black Americans over the age of 20, 63% of men and 77% of women are overweight or obese, and, in general, Black people in the U.S. are more likely than white Americans to suffer from diabetes. —Trey Williams, Fortune, 17 Apr. 2024

About 78% of people with type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese. —Lauryn Higgins, Health, 16 Apr. 2024

Research published in the journal Nature Genetics on Thursday points to variants that raise the chance of being obese by as much as six times. —TIME, 4 Apr. 2024

Viking said Tuesday that a mid-stage trial showed that obese or overweight patients on the highest dose of its drug lost an average of about 14.7 percent of their body weight after injecting it once weekly for 13 weeks — 13 percent more weight loss than a placebo group. —Daniel Gilbert, Washington Post, 27 Feb. 2024

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 5 American children were overweight or obese in 2018, and that number is increasing each year. —Kyle Russell, USA TODAY, 31 Jan. 2024

Being overweight or obese increases risk of death, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, high cholesterol, several types of cancers, coronary heart disease, sleep apnea, gallbladder disease and mental health issues like depression and anxiety. —Arianna Johnson, Forbes, 29 Feb. 2024

The process of storing fat is accelerated and made more efficient by being sedentary, another common trait of the typical obese American. —Bryant Stamford, The Courier-Journal, 1 Feb. 2024

Word History

Etymology

borrowed from Latin obēsus "fat, stout," past participle of *obedere, perhaps meaning originally "to gnaw," from ob- "against" + edere "to eat" — more at ob-, eat entry 1

Note: Etymologically obēsus should mean "thin, emaciated," if the sense of the unattested verb *obedere was "to eat away, gnaw," as implied by its components. The Roman writer Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae 19.7.3) pointed this out and adduced a passage from the poet Laevius (who is known only from a handful of quotations from his works made by other authors), where the word apparently has the meaning "wasted." Presumably the word went reanalysis after the extinction of the verb. The grammarian Pompeius Festus construed the derivation phrasally as "made fat as if as a result of eating" ("pinguis quasi ob edendum factus").

First Known Use

1651, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

obese

adjective

ō-ˈbēs 

: very fat

obesity

ō-ˈbē-sət-ē

noun

Medical Definition

obese

adjective

ō-ˈbēs 

: having excessive body fat : affected by obesity