obese
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of obese
First recorded in 1645–55; from Latin obēsus, adjective use of past participle of obedere, obesse (unrecorded) “to eat away,” from ob- ob- + edere, esse “to eat” ( see also eat)
Explanation
Obese means excessively fat. In medical terms, it means you have a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, at which point your body's excess fat begins to threaten your health. In the last third of the 20th century and into the 21st, increasing numbers of Americans are obese, in what health professionals call "an obesity epidemic"; they attribute it to rising portion-sizes, increased consumption of processed food, the demise of family meals, and food marketing, among other factors.
Vocabulary lists containing obese
Burning Blue
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Vocabulary Video Contest (2013) - List 2
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Articles on Nutrition
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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.
Just one week of strength training was enough to increase visceral fat breakdown in obese mice, even though their body weight had not yet changed.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 8, 2026
More important, the patients with a body mass index of 35 or higher who took the highest dose of retatrutide were no longer classified as obese after undergoing treatment.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 30, 2026
Patients with Type 2 diabetes who are either overweight or obese are an inherently difficult-to-treat patient population, the analyst says.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 22, 2026
"What we want to see is whether some of the pharmacological impact on human physiology that has been observed in obese patients would also occur in non-obese, highly trained people."
From BBC ● Sep. 10, 2026
Seventeen percent of kids age six through nineteen are obese.
From "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan
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.
