abdominal
Americanadjective
noun
-
abdominals
plural
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of abdominal
Explanation
Anything abdominal relates to the midsection of your body, just below your chest and above your pelvis. Abdominal muscles are sometimes called “abs” and they’re the muscles in your abdomen. All abdominal things relate to the belly area. If your stomach hurts, you have abdominal pain. Sit-ups are abdominal exercises. Do enough sit-ups and you'll have washboard abs because the rippled muscles look like, well, a washboard. Any stomach surgery is a type of abdominal surgery. Sometimes abdominal is used as a noun that’s short for abdominal muscle.
Vocabulary lists containing abdominal
Turtles All the Way Down
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The Hot Zone
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Stuart Little
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
One morning in August, Nancy Crockett of Holden, Mass., took her middle-aged son Adam Davis to the E.R. for abdominal pain.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2026
The aim is to detect hard-to-diagnose abdominal cancers, including liver, ovarian and pancreatic cancer, much sooner.
From BBC ● Nov. 4, 2026
Such symptoms include gas, abdominal pain, bloating, and diarrhea or nausea, after consuming a certain amount of dairy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 12, 2026
The researchers concluded that CBL-514 significantly reduced visceral abdominal fat compared with placebo.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 11, 2026
Kat condemns it, because, he says, a man has to reckon with the possibility of an abdominal wound, and that is more dangerous on a full stomach than on an empty one.
From "All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel" by Erich Maria Remarque
Hwang, who treats people with pelvic floor issues, said she addresses tense abdominals in her patients “on a regular basis.”
From Washington Post ● Nov. 12, 2021
Women tend to be more flexible and sometimes overextend their low backs, and we just need to do a little maintenance to keep our low abdominals, low back, and pelvic floor strong and working together.
From Slate ● May 13, 2020
The exercise above—a modified Turkish sit-up—improves strength in the abdominals and upper back.
From Golf Digest ● Oct. 24, 2019
I learned the correct swing, which was surprisingly complex and involved pumping your legs to an odd rhythm and holding a pike position on the backswing — hell on the abdominals.
From Salon ● Mar. 16, 2013
She’ll have to make sure to add some crunches and leg lifts to strengthen her abdominals and her glutes.
From "A Heart in a Body in the World" by Deb Caletti
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
