swole

adjective

ˈswōl

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

Mark Wahlberg's swole body should be motivation to hit the gym—at least until you quit your New Year's resolution in 3 weeks …—

TMZ

—often used with get

If you don't take a photo of yourself after you've spent at least 45 minutes trying to get swole, did you even work out?—

Hope Schreiber

Did you know?

If someone said you were swole, would you know how to respond? If you’re unfamiliar with the word, you might think your face is swollen or check yourself for signs of puffiness. If you know the word, however, you’d know you’re in fact looking quite fit and muscular and might respond with a simple “Thank you for noticing.” Often used on social media, swole has come to be a complimentary term for those with a physique enhanced by weightlifting and bodybuilding exercises. The word isn’t exactly new—swole goes back to Middle English as a past tense and past participle of swell meaning “to enlarge,” “to bulge,” or “to puff out” (literally and figuratively). In the late 1980s the sense of “having well-defined muscles” emerged as a regional variant of swollen in African American English. Rapper Ice-T used the adjective in his 1991 song “The Tower”: “And hit the weight pile / The brothers was swole.” In addition, it was applied as a verb to describe becoming ripped or cut, as when the late Tupac Shakur applied it in his 1997 song “When I Get Free”: “… did push-ups till I swole up.”

Examples of swole in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Getting swole will still require actual work, though. —

Gear Team, WIRED, 4 Dec. 2023 Instagram posts have appeared with images of your swole bod. —

Steven Levy, WIRED, 14 July 2023 My main objective wasn’t to get swole, but the lack of growth still bummed me out. —

Brett Williams, Men's Health, 27 June 2023 Gotta get those shoveling muscles swole. —

Erik Kain, Forbes, 20 Feb. 2023 Jackman has been playing the character of Wolverine for over 20 years, beginning with the 2000 movie X-Men, and his physique throughout that franchise has changed considerably—as have audience expectations regarding just how swole a leading man should be. —

Philip Ellis, Men's Health, 19 Mar. 2023 Austin’s foil: McMahon himself, whose onscreen presence morphed from that of an excitable host with square-dad energy to that of a swaggering, scowling, uncannily swole, and evil boss whose employees provided cathartic comeuppance. —

Dan Greene, The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2023 But more important than all that is the fact that I’m ripped, yoked, jacked, and swole, brother! —

Eric Farwell, The New Yorker, 8 Mar. 2023

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'swole.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.