gout

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A painful disease that swells the joints, especially the big toe, caused by too much uric acid in the body.

   Years of rich food and wine left him suffering from gout.

2. 2
   noun

   A drop or splash of liquid, especially blood.

   Dark gouts of blood marked the trail.

Simplified etymology

Gout comes through Old French goute from medieval Latin gutta, literally “a drop.” The disease received this name from the former belief that diseased matter dropped from the blood into the joints; the older literal sense survives in expressions such as “gouts of blood.”

From Middle English goute, from Old French gote, gute, from Latin gutta (“drop”). Compare Spanish gota (“drop, droplet”). Doublet of goutte and gutta. The sense shift derived from humorism and "the notion of the 'dropping' of a morbid material from the blood in and around the joints".

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