brolic

adjective

brol·​ic ˈbrä-lik 

informal

: extremely muscular : having a physique enhanced by bodybuilding exercises : swole

… I'm about to start going to the gym to get brolic …

—Michael Rainey, Jr., quoted in The New York Post

… some lingering soreness after the collision with the Rangers' brolic right fielder.

—Shawn McFarland

broadly : strong

Brolic and agile, they were working cats in the past, used in food stores to keep rats away.

—Marta Campabadal

Word History

Etymology

of uncertain origin

Note: The earliest occurrence of the word appears to be in rap lyrics of the late 1990's. It is found (pronounced /ˈbrɑ lɪk/) on the 1997 track "Long Kiss Goodnight" from the album Life After Death by the Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher G.L. Wallace), and on "Brolic Mode," a track on a 1998 album by the group Coins, affiliated with the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan. In neither usage is the meaning entirely clear. On online forums such as Reddit it has been suggested that brolic has been formed from Broly, a character in the Dragon Ball media franchise who first appeared in three anime films in 1993-94. Broly, whose Japanese name Burorī is a play on the English word broccoli, is a bare-chested, muscular figure with spiky green hair. It is possible that Broly as an attributive before a noun could have been interpreted as brolic, with the adjective suffix -ic. However, versions of the Broly films dubbed in English only appeared in the early 2000's. It hence remains to be established whether American pop culture would have had sufficient familiarity with anime at that time to turn a character name into an adjective.

First Known Use

circa 2003, in the meaning defined above