tumid

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   literary or technical: swollen, bulging, or enlarged

   Rain filled the river until its tumid surface pressed against the banks.

2. 2
   adj

   literary: inflated, pompous, or excessively grand in style

   The editor reduced the speech's tumid rhetoric to three plain sentences.

Borrowed from Latin tumidus, 'swollen,' from tumere, 'to swell.' Physical enlargement is the oldest sense; the figurative description of inflated language extends the same image to pompous style.

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