MEANING
1. A fluid made by the liver that helps the body digest and absorb fats.
2. Strong, bitter anger or hostility, often expressed in harsh words or behaviour.
Use it for
understanding a bodily reference without confusing it with anger; describing a bitter physical sensation in prose; distinguishing digestive fluid from blood or salivaSeparates a digestive fluid from the established metaphor of bitter, hostile expression. Writing functions: Bitterness / Bodily Detail.
Words that belong together
- bile production
- the flow of bile
- a taste of bile
On the page
A bitter taste of bile interrupted the sentence she had prepared.
The medical passage describes the flow of bile, not a theory of temperament.
The letter was full of bile, but almost empty of facts.
She let him pour out his bile before asking the question again.
Word forms
- Base
- bile
Usage notes
Usually uncountable: bile. No ordinary plural needed in either main sense. Register: neutral. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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