balloon
Pluralballoons
Verbballoons, ballooning, ballooned
Pluralballoons
Formsballoons, ballooning, ballooned
- 1A small, thin rubber bag inflated with air or gas, used as a child's toy or a party decoration.
A stray balloon drifted up past the apartment windows.
They decorated the gym with streamers and balloons for graduation.
- 2A large inflatable craft, filled with heated air or a light gas, designed to carry people or equipment through the air.
The balloon rose silently over the valley as the burner roared.
Weather services launch balloons carrying instruments high into the atmosphere.
Note
Early flights were improvised affairs. In John Jeffries and Jean-Pierre Blanchard's narrative of 1786, the travelers are still descending after throwing out biscuits and apples. They then cast away their oars or 'wings', and finally the governail. The craft has no engine of its own. Heated air, helium or hydrogen gives it lift, and it is steered mainly by finding winds at different altitudes.
- 3An inflatable, buoyant object, often though not necessarily round and flexible in shape.
Salvage crews attached a balloon to the wreck to raise it from the harbor floor.
Barrage balloons tethered above the city forced enemy aircraft to fly higher.
Note
The toy, the passenger craft and the surgical sac are all narrower cases of this general sense. Yet the word began with a ball. It entered English in 1570 naming the old ball game, played with a large inflated leather ball. It came from Italian pallone, "large ball," from palla, "ball," possibly via Middle French ballon. What survived the shift was the inflation, not the game.
- 4To increase or expand rapidly in size, amount, or extent.
The city's population ballooned during the oil boom.
Deficits balloon when spending outpaces revenue.
Similarsoar, swell, mushroom, skyrocket, escalate
Oppositeshrink, dwindle, plummet, contract
Note
Writers reach for it when a quantity grows faster than anyone can manage. Conrad Landin wrote in RAIL (2022) that ScotRail's government support 'has ballooned' since the pandemic. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky called one film franchise's cast 'ballooning, unmanageable'. The present participle works well as an adjective before a noun. The verb is intransitive: the thing swells by itself. For making something swell, see the transitive 'inflate' sense.
- 5A speech bubble; the rounded outline in a cartoon or comic that contains a character's words.
The letterer adjusted the balloon so it wouldn't cover the character's face.
Translators often rewrite dialogue to fit inside the original balloons.
Similarbubble
- 6The outline drawn around words to show that they are spoken by a pictured figure.
In the engraving, a balloon issues from the senator's mouth, carrying his famous quip.
Early political cartoons crowded their balloons with long, winding speeches.
Similarbubble
Note
Engraving and caricature give this sense its technical home. The outline usually carries a tail or pointer aimed at the speaker. That pointer is what marks the enclosed words as dialogue rather than caption or narration. Comics letterers use the same word, and everyday readers know the shape as a speech bubble.
- 7To inflate or puff something out in the manner of a balloon.
A sudden gust ballooned her skirt as she crossed the platform.
Pastry chefs balloon the dough with steam to create a hollow center.
Similarinflate, puff, billow, swell
Oppositedeflate
Note
Wind is the typical agent and cloth the typical object. In Emily Carr's The House of All Sorts (1944), a puff of wind from an open door 'ballooned the scanties', and off they sailed out the window. Here the verb needs a direct object. When the swelling happens on its own, English uses the intransitive form instead: her skirt ballooned.
- 8To ascend or travel through the air in a balloon.
The couple ballooned over the vineyards on their anniversary.
Adventurers still balloon across mountain ranges, chasing distance records.
Similarfloat
- 9A small inflatable sac inserted into a part of the body for therapeutic purposes, as in angioplasty.
During the procedure, the cardiologist inflated a balloon to widen the narrowed artery.
Gastric balloons occupy space in the stomach to help patients eat less.
Note
Medicine mostly uses it as a modifier: balloon angioplasty, the gastric balloon. The sac usually rides on a catheter into a vessel, duct or organ and is expanded once it is in place. In angioplasty, the inflation presses plaque against the artery wall so that blood can flow freely again.
- 10To send a ball high up into the air with a kick, hit, or other stroke.
The striker ballooned his shot over the crossbar from six yards out.
Golfers who balloon their drives into the wind lose distance.
Note
Sports reporting uses it for the skied shot, and it almost always means a mishit: the ball goes higher than intended. In soccer the ball is usually ballooned over the goal. Steve Wilson's A View From The Terraces (2015) has a striker who 'ballooned the ball over from six yards'. Golfers say it of drives that climb steeply into the wind and lose distance.
- 11A single large payment due at the end of a loan term, much larger than the regular installments before it; synonymous with balloon payment.
Their mortgage carried low monthly payments but ended with a fifty-thousand-dollar balloon.
Refinancing before the balloon comes due can spare borrowers a scramble for cash.
Note
A clipping of balloon payment that lenders use as a noun in its own right: the balloon comes due. Scheduled installments cover interest and only part of the principal, so the rest falls due as one lump sum at maturity. James M. Johnson's Fundamentals of finance for equipment lessors (1986) states the trade-off plainly: the balloon exists to lower each periodic payment.
- 12A drinking glass with a wide, rounded bowl, sometimes used for serving brandy.
He cradled the balloon in his palm to warm the cognac before the first sip.
The bar serves its gin and tonics in oversized balloons packed with ice and citrus peel.
Similarsnifter
- 13
- 14A small container for illicit drugs, made from a condom, the finger of a latex glove, or similar material.
Customs officers detained a courier who had swallowed dozens of heroin-filled balloons.
The dealer kept each dose tied off in a small balloon tucked in his cheek.
Note
Drug-trade slang for street packaging: a condom, toy balloon or glove finger, filled and knotted off. It takes of before the drug. In David Cornwell's Like it Matters (2016), a narrator carries 'a balloon of coke' hidden between two pairs of underpants. The word figures heavily in accounts of body-packing, where couriers swallow balloons, and of the retail heroin trade.
- 15A bomb or shell, especially one fired into the air as part of a fireworks display.
The crew lowered each balloon carefully into its mortar before the display began.
The final balloon burst into a sphere of gold sparks over the harbor.
Similarshell
Note
Fireworks makers mean a shell: a hollow pasteboard case packed with stars and a bursting charge. It is lowered into a mortar and fired to explode high overhead. The word once stretched to military bombs and shells as well. In modern prose this sense needs a pyrotechnic setting, or a reader will picture a party toy.
- 16A woman's breast; a coarse, jocular slang use, usually in the plural.
The tabloid ran a leering headline about the actress's balloons.
He elbowed his friend and muttered that her right balloon had nearly escaped her top.
Similarboobs, breasts, bust, bosom, cans
Note
Slang of this kind trades on a visual joke, likening the breast to the party balloon for its roundness. It turns up mostly in the plural and in a leering register, from tabloid headlines to muttered asides, so it reads as mocking rather than affectionate. Outside deliberately crude humor it is best avoided. Said to or about a real woman, it will usually land as an insult.
- 17A ball or globe set on top of a pillar, church, or similar structure.
A gilded balloon crowns the cathedral's central dome.
Masons hoisted the carved stone balloons onto the gateposts at the end of the drive.
Note
Architectural vocabulary, with St. Paul's Cathedral in London as the usual illustration: the globe set high at the top of the building. Such globes crown piers, pillars, domes and steeples and are sometimes gilded. They belong to the family of globe-form finials on classical and baroque exteriors. Outside architectural description, readers will more readily understand ball or globe.
- 18A spherical glass vessel, usually with a short neck, used to hold or receive the product of distillation.
The chemist set a clean balloon beneath the condenser to catch the distillate.
Old engravings of laboratories show retorts feeding their vapors into waiting balloons.
Note
A word from the older chemistry of retorts and condensers. Its round body heats evenly over a flame, which is why the shape lasted: the modern round-bottom flask carries it on. Because the vessel now goes by that newer name, balloon in this sense turns up mostly in historical descriptions of distillation.
- 19Of an aircraft, to plunge alternately up and down instead of holding steady flight.
The trainer ballooned in the gusty crosswind, pitching up and down on final approach.
Light aircraft often balloon when they cross sudden updrafts near the runway.
Note
Pilots also call this up-and-down motion porpoising. It comes with turbulence or over-corrected pitch inputs. It also describes an unwanted rise during the landing flare when an aircraft carries too much airspeed. Flying Magazine (1961) catches it near the ground: the plane 'ballooned into the air about 20 feet, banging down again for another good-sized hop.'
- 20A game played with a large inflated ball, popular in earlier centuries but no longer played.
The courtiers shed their coats and played balloon in the palace yard until dusk.
A wager on balloon cost the young squire a month's wages.
Note
The game that gave the word its name. Players in Renaissance and early modern Europe struck a large inflated leather ball, often with a wooden brace worn on the forearm. Like tennis or chess, it takes no article: they played balloon. Being obsolete, it belongs in historical writing or period fiction, where modern readers will usually need a gloss.
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Origin
First recorded in 1570 as the name of a game played with a large inflated leather ball, possibly via Middle French ballon, from Italian pallone ("large ball"), from palla ("ball"). This traces back through Germanic roots to Proto-Indo-European *bʰel- ("to blow, swell, inflate"), and is related to Old High German ballo and German Ball ("ball").