Nauseous

How to spell nauseous

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nauseous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nauseous mean?

1. adjectiveAffected by a sick, queasy feeling in the stomach.
2. adjectiveCausing a feeling of sickness or disgust.

Nauseous in a sentence

• The long car journey left her feeling nauseous by lunchtime.

• A nauseous smell of rotting food drifted from the bin.

• He felt nauseous after eating the reheated leftovers.

• The medicine had a nauseous flavour that was hard to swallow.

Where does nauseous come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin nauseosus, meaning 'causing sickness', which was built on nausea, the Latin word for seasickness or queasiness. That noun was borrowed in turn from the Greek nausia (also nautia), which literally meant 'seasickness', and it grew directly out of naus, the Greek word for 'ship'. In other words, the original notion was the churning stomach of a queasy sailor, the same seafaring root that gives us 'nautical' and 'nautilus'. English adopted nauseous in the early 1600s, at first mainly in the sense of 'causing disgust or sickness', and only later did the now-common sense of 'feeling sick' take hold. The spelling trap is the quiet '-eous' cluster in the middle: the 'e' is barely heard, so writers often drop it or swap the order, yet it is the surviving trace of that Latin nausea.

How the word is built

• nause- (from Latin nausea: seasickness)
• -ous (adjective suffix: full of)