glut
Americanverb (used with object)
verb (used without object)
noun
-
a full supply.
-
an excessive supply or amount; surfeit.
- Synonyms:
- superabundance, excess, surplus
-
an act of glutting or the state of being glutted.
noun
-
an excessive amount, as in the production of a crop, often leading to a fall in price
-
the act of glutting or state of being glutted
verb
-
to feed or supply beyond capacity
-
to supply (a market) with a commodity in excess of the demand for it
-
to cram full or choke up
to glut a passage
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
glutsimple
-
glutssimple
-
have gluttedperfect
-
has gluttedperfect
-
am gluttingprogressive
-
are gluttingprogressive
-
is gluttingprogressive
-
have been gluttingperfect progressive
-
has been gluttingperfect progressive
Past
-
gluttedsimple
-
had gluttedperfect
-
was gluttingprogressive
-
were gluttingprogressive
-
had been gluttingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of glut
1275–1325; Middle English gluten, back formation from glutun glutton 1
Explanation
A glut is too much of something. A glut of gas in the marketplace can lower its price. A glut of heavy metal T-shirts in your dresser, however, has nothing to do with the economy but might be a signal that it's time to clean your room. Glut comes from the Old French gloter, meaning "to swallow too much." The glottis is the part of your body where your vocal folds reside and where you swallow. If you go to the movies alone and get the family tub of popcorn, you are glutting yourself on the salty snack, but do try not to get any popcorn stuck in your glottis. Glut is used more commonly in reference to the economics of the marketplace, where an oversupply of one thing lowers prices.
Vocabulary lists containing glut
100 SAT Words Beginning with "G"
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Beowulf
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Teeming Terms: Synonyms for "Full"
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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:
The result of the federal tax credit has been a glut of apartments costing renters on the order of about $1,400 a month for a one-bedroom.
From Salon ● Jul. 4, 2026
The market is “facing the risk of a temporary glut as trapped oil finally re-enters a system that has already spent months learning how to function without it,” they noted.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 2, 2026
This year, the strain put on capital markets by the glut of tech issuance raises questions around investors’ capacity to absorb further capital raises expected in the coming months.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 1, 2026
They were already grappling with poor harvests because of unfavourable weather when the glut hit.
From BBC ● Jun. 29, 2026
The man was short, his body a glut of muscles, his hair thinning and sun-bleached.
From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Sugar prices dropped 4.1% in February as global supply gluts extended a long-term decline, with the cost of sugar now over 27% lower compared to its February 2025 levels.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 6, 2026
Oligopolies can and do fall into price wars or production gluts.
From Barron's ● Jan. 2, 2026
Ultimately, this all helps promote true sustainability: long-lasting and durable products and batteries that aren’t just for luxury on one end, black-market speculation on the other, and market gluts on yet another.
From Slate ● Jul. 15, 2024
Good harvest years can produce market gluts that make it hard to turn a profit.
From Salon ● Jun. 8, 2023
Giving himself repeated daily shots of canine insulin in the abdomen, arm, or leg, Woolf almost certainly spent his days boomeranging between insulin gluts and deficits.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
The musical is rewardingly small-scaled, an oddity itself in the West End, glutted with splashy Broadway imports.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2025
Underwater and forsaken, American homeowners watched as their earth-toned Tuscan kitchens and quirky bits of ornament made their homes slow to move in a glutted market.
From Salon ● Aug. 23, 2025
At the same time, Mexican farmers soon learned how to push asparagus nearly year-round and into California during the state’s harvesting season, which glutted the market, Watte said.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 8, 2024
China's glutted market in polyethylene and polyesters after years of rapid petrochemical capacity expansion is prompting some of the shift.
From Reuters ● Jul. 24, 2023
By midday, the grandstand and clubhouse were glutted, so Vanderbilt redirected fans by the thousands into the infield.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
Unfinished Ford trucks — 40,000 or so — are glutting Kentucky Speedway’s auxiliary parking lots in Sparta, a victim of the semiconductor shortage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, TheDrive.com reported.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 23, 2022
For many years, Mr. Xi announced China’s intention to reduce its steel production, only for output to rise the next year as individual provinces increased production, glutting the market and hurting the industry nationally.
From New York Times ● Jul. 26, 2022
The glutting on essential groceries, eggs, milk, bottled water, so that empty grocery shelves confronted the more restrained among us.
From Salon ● Jun. 20, 2020
If anything, it does the opposite, glutting the viewer with despair.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 21, 2020
Periods of prosperity attended by rising prices necessarily violate this condition of business hygiene and inevitably end by glutting markets.
From Readings in Money and Banking Selected and Adapted by Phillips, Chester Arthur
Definitions 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.
