obese

adjective

ō-ˈbēs 

: having excessive body fat

Synonyms

• blubbery
• chubby
• corpulent
• fat
• fleshy
• full
• gross
• lardy
• overweight
• plump
• podgy [chiefly British]
• portly
• pudgy
• replete
• roly-poly
• rotund
• round
• tubby

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

More than half of those with knee OA are overweight or obese, which places excess stress on the joint and causes inflammation, both of which contribute to disease progression. —New Atlas, 28 Apr. 2025

Medicare, the federal health program for adults 65 and older, has been prohibited by law from covering weight loss drugs for older Americans who are obese but do not have diabetes or heart disease. —Ken Alltucker, USA Today, 4 Apr. 2025

Researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology examined how eating fresh mangoes affected inflammation and insulin sensitivity in overweight and obese adults with low-grade chronic inflammation, as reported by SWNS. —Khloe Quill, Fox News, 20 Mar. 2025

This summer, Ricks expects to sit through a few more meetings like this one, when his team will see results from studies testing the drug as a weight-loss treatment in people who are overweight or obese but don’t have diabetes. —Alice Park, Time, 17 Apr. 2025

Word History

Etymology

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").

First Known Use

1651, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for obese

• apiece
• aris
• assise
• caprice
• cerise
• decease
• decrease
• eyepiece
• facepiece
• handpiece
• headpiece
• increase

Kids Definition

obese

adjective

ō-ˈbēs 

: very fat

obesity

ō-ˈbē-sət-ē

noun

Medical Definition

obese

adjective

ō-ˈbēs 

: having excessive body fat : affected by obesity