nauseate
Formsnauseates, nauseating, nauseated
- 1To cause someone to feel nausea, the queasy feeling of being about to vomit.
Some of these pain medicines nauseate patients if they are taken on an empty stomach.
The diesel fumes in the ferry's lower deck nauseated several passengers.
Similarsicken
Note
The sickness here began at sea: the word comes from Latin nauseō, "to feel seasick," by way of nausea and Greek nausía. Its subject is the cause, such as fumes, foul air or a medicine, and its object the person made queasy. The passive is common, and Henry James has a landlady breathing fetid air without being nauseated.
- 2To fill someone with disgust.
Endless self-promotion on social media can nauseate even the most patient followers.
The senator's hypocrisy nauseates voters who once trusted him.
Similardisgust, sicken, revolt, repel, repulse
Note
Moral and social disgust, carried over from the stomach to the mind: hypocrisy, gossip and self-promotion all nauseate. Henry Neville in 1681 already has tittle-tattle that nauseated a listener for three days together. The object can even be left out, as when Thackeray describes a man repeating his confounded jokes until they quite nauseate.
- 3To feel nausea or become squeamish, or to turn away in disgust.
Patients who nauseate after anesthesia are usually given medicine before surgery.
The new nurse nauseated at the sight of the wound but stayed at the bedside.
Note
Without an object the verb turns around, and the subject is the one who feels sick. Alexander Pope pairs it bluntly with puke in 1733 (I puke, I nauseate), and a 1903 medical report notes that the stomach soon began to nauseate. Its natural setting is the sickbed, with a patient or a stomach as the subject.
Less common meanings
- 4To be disgusted by a particular thing.
Old Age, with silent pace, comes creeping on, Nauseates the Praise, which in her Youth she won, And hates the Muse by which she was undone.
1692, “The Seventh Satyr”, in Charles DrydenNote
The figurative partner of the old spitting-out meaning: what the palate once rejected, the mind now refuses. The Drydens' Satires of 1692 has Old Age that nauseates the praise it won in youth, and Frances Burney's Camilla still uses it in 1796. A present-day reader would take such sentences the other way round, as in the "disgust" meaning, so it belongs to reading older texts.
- 5To reject or spit out something because it brings on a feeling of nausea.
Note
An old physical use in which the mouth refuses what it tastes and puts it back out. Daniel Defoe's castaway tries salt, grimaces and spits and sputters at it, and Washington Irving in 1807 imagines a patient whose palate nauseates the very medicine that would cure him. Modern readers meet it only in older texts.
Practice
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Origin
From the earlier form nauseat, from Latin nauseātus ("nauseated"), the past participle of nauseō ("to feel seasick, nauseate"), from nausea, from Ancient Greek ναυσία (nausía), from ναῦς (naûs), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)neh₂-. It can also be read as nausea + -ate.