BILE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Bile

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/baɪl/ Listen

noun

Bile n.

(Physiol.) A yellow, or greenish, viscid fluid, usually alkaline in reaction, secreted by the liver. It passes into the intestines, where it aids in the digestive process. Its characteristic constituents are the bile salts, and coloring matters.

Bitterness of feeling; choler; anger; ill humor; as, to stir one's bile. Note: The ancients considered the bile to be the "humor" which caused irascibility.

Bile n. A boil. (Obs. or Archaic)

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Etymology of 'Bile'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Bile" Quotes from Famous Books

... eatin', though not very much fer style! Shuck an arm-full fer yer dinner, sot 'em on en let 'em bile; Salt 'em well, en smear some butter on the juicy cobs ez sweet Ez the lips of maple-suger thet yer sweet-heart has to eat! Talk about ole Mount Olympus en the stuff them roosters spread On theyr tables when they feasted,—nectar ...

— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller

... at the time. The credit of having been the first to formulate the doctrine of internal secretion is generally given to Claude Bernard. He discovered the glycogenic function of the liver, and proved that in addition to secreting bile, that organ stores up glycogen from the sugar absorbed in the stomach and intestines, and gives it out again as sugar to the blood. In 1855 he maintained that every organ of the body by a process of internal secretion gives up products to the blood. He did not, however, discover the action ...

— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped—the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an overripe apple which might have been left ...

— Dubliners • James Joyce

... for me were such fine things as good health, long life, contentment. Contentment, sure. Continued irritation—a sour disposition resulting in excess flow of bile—did not provide just the sort of environment in which they cared to bring up the kiddies. Smoking? No. It wasn't healthy. Alcohol? Well, they were willing to declare a national holiday now ...

— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart

... a trial of George III., browbeating the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron. There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have invariably ...

— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

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