Definition of OBESE

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

One day in early May, the firehouse received only one emergency call — six firefighters were dispatched to help an obese woman move from one chair to another inside her home. — Tim Craig, Washington Post, "Answering the call," 1 June 2018 And while rates of colon, rectal and kidney cancers were higher among obese women than normal-weight women in the Norwegian study, those differences did not reach statistical significance. — Melissa Healy, latimes.com, "Obesity may make women more vulnerable to a host of cancers, especially if they gain weight quickly," 23 May 2018 Although the proportion of women who are underweight decreased, the proportion of obese women globally climbed from 6% to 15% between 1975 and 2014. — Jacqueline Howard, CNN, "How dad's pre-conception health can affect the baby, too," 16 Apr. 2018 Brigham and Women’s IVF clinic is one of the few clinics that will treat very obese women, a population known to have lower success rates with in vitro fertilization, Dr. Racowsky said. — Pam Belluck, New York Times, "What Fertility Patients Should Know About Egg Freezing," 13 Mar. 2018 The Global BMI Mortality Collaboration reports in the Lancet that overweight and obese populations have higher mortality, regardless of country. — Scott W. Atlas, WSJ, "Single Payer’s Misleading Statistics," 17 Dec. 2018 Larger people, whether obese or pregnant, exhale more CO2, which is one way mosquitoes target you. — Michael Roizen, M.d., And Mehmet Oz, Houston Chronicle, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment," 24 June 2018 Basically women who are obese have between a two- and fourfold higher risk of pregnancy than a woman of normal weight. — Macaela Mackenzie, Glamour, "What Shrill Gets Right—and Wrong—About the Morning-After Pill Weight Limit," 15 Mar. 2019 Mothers who live a healthier lifestyle, following habits such as a good diet and regular exercise, can decrease the risk of raising an obese child, a study suggests. — Brett Molina, USA TODAY, "Moms could be to blame for childhood obesity, Harvard study suggests," 5 July 2018

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

History and Etymology for obese

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").

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