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

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 Kentucky has one of the highest percentages of obese children in the nation, the study found. — Sarah Brookbank, Cincinnati.com, "WalletHub: Children's healthcare in Ky., Oh. is okay, not great," 18 Apr. 2018 Lustig's research revealed that when obese children eliminated added sugars from their diets for just nine days, every aspect of their metabolic health improved -- despite no changes in body weight or total calories consumed. — Lisa Drayer, CNN, "One-month sugar detox: A nutritionist explains how and why," 1 Mar. 2018 The problem also isn’t uniquely American, the number of obese children under the age of five also increased globally during the same time period from 32 to 41 million, CNN reports. — Emily Price, Fortune, "Obesity Rates in Young Children Are on the Rise," 27 Feb. 2018 Along with a rapidly aging population, China also has the largest number of obese children in the world, as well as more diabetes patients than anywhere else. — Sui-lee Wee And Paul Mozur, New York Times, "Amazon Wants to Disrupt Health Care in America. In China, Tech Giants Already Have.," 31 Jan. 2018 And if so, should the obese child temporarily be removed from his or her parents? — Redbook, "Is Childhood Obesity a Result of Parental Neglect?," 14 July 2011 One out of every 20 South Koreans is obese, the second-lowest rate, after Japan, among members of the wealthy-nation club, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. — Timothy W. Martin, WSJ, "Gut Check: Does Binge Watching Binge Eating Make You Fat?," 2 Jan. 2019

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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