bloated

adjective bloat·ed \ ˈblō-təd \

Updated on: 6 Apr 2018

Definition of bloated

: overfilled and extended with liquid, gas, food, etc.

felt bloated from eating too much

a bloated body

—often used figuratively to describe something as having grown excessively large

a bloated budget

a bloated bureaucracy

See bloated defined for English-language learners

Examples of bloated in a Sentence

I felt bloated from eating too much.
a bloated sense of his own importance

Recent Examples of bloated from the Web

Boards of trustees are often insular and bloated, and will likely be ineffective at facing broad questions about responsible budgeting and stewardship facing today’s colleges, plus new consumer, state, and federal oversight demands.

— BostonGlobe.com, "Boston is the nation’s college capital. Here’s how to keep it that way," 3 Apr. 2018
Bursitis in his shoulder limited him to 86 2/3 innings—his fewest since his rookie season in 2005 and second straight under 200—and ineffectiveness left him with a bloated 4.36 ERA and 17 home runs surrendered, or nearly two per nine.

— jon tayler, SI.com, "The Old Félix Hernández Showed Up for the Mariners on Opening Day," 30 Mar. 2018
Sometimes adventure movies become so bloated with action scenes that the story stops being interesting, but Ready Player One resists that impulse for most of its runtime.

— alissa wilkinson, Vox, "Ready Player One is a fun romp that’s even more dystopian than it realizes," 29 Mar. 2018
As with so many other things, John Arnold saw the system as a broken market, where benefits for teachers and other public employees were bloated and governments were given all the wrong incentives.

— rebecca robbins, STAT, "A billionaire couple is pumping money into the drug pricing debate. Can they loosen pharma’s grip?," 26 Mar. 2018
The other explanation for the bloated sales figures is that people have flocked to Trump Tower projects hoping to buy something more than a place to live.

— anjali kamat, The New Republic, "Political Corruption and the Art of the Deal," 21 Mar. 2018
The issue with this change is that playtime is still somewhat bloated, undermining the patch job.

— charlie theel, Ars Technica, "Rum and Bones: Second Tide," 17 Mar. 2018
Yet a 64-team women’s tournament still looks like a bloated exercise in gender equity that only underscores the enormous differences between the teams with the big guns and those that annually act as cannon fodder.

— tim sullivan, The Courier-Journal, "Women's basketball needs madness – not sameness. NCAA Tournament is still too mismatched," 15 Mar. 2018
On August 17, 2014, the body of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine — the body of a child — was found wrapped in a duvet cover by a father and son walking along the shore; her body was bloated and weighed down with more than 20 pounds of rocks.

— nahanni fontaine, Teen Vogue, "Tina Fontaine Is Further Proof That Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Need Justice," 12 Mar. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'bloated.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.