Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To discharge or excrete from the body.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To discharge or void, as excrement: opposed to ingest.
  • To defecate; pass dejecta of any kind.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb (Physiol.) To cast or throw out; to void, as excrement; to excrete, as the indigestible matter of the food; in an extended sense, to excrete by the lungs, skin, or kidneys.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To excrete from the body.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb eliminate from the body

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin ēgerere, ēgest-, to carry out : ē-, ex-, ex- + gerere, to carry.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From ēgest-, the perfect passive participial stem of the Latin ēgerō ("I carry, bear, or bring out or away”, “I discharge").

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Examples

Comments

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  • WORD: egest

    EXAMPLE: ' Each candidate was to deliver two stool specimens to the Lovelace laboratory in Dixie cups, and days were going by and Conrad had been unable to egest even one, and the staff kept getting after him about it. Finally he managed to produce a single bolus, a mean hard little ball no more than an inch in diameter and shot through with some kind of seeds, whole seeds, undigested. Then he remembered. The first night in Albuquerque he had gone to a Mexican restaurant and eaten a lot of jalapeño peppers. They were jalapeño seeds. Even in the turd world this was a pretty miserable-looking objet. So Conrad tied a red ribbon around the goddamned thing, with a bow and all, and put it in the Dixie cup and delivered it to the lab. Curious about the ribbons that flopped out over the lip of the cup, the technicians all peered in. Conrad broke into his full cackle of mirth, much the way Wally might have. No one was swept up in the joke, however. The Lovelace staffers looked at the beribboned bolus, and then they looked at Conrad . . . as if he were a bug on the windshield of the pace car of medical progress. '

    --- 1979. TOM WOLFE. The Right Stuff. "Chapter 4 -- The Lab Rat." (Page 75 ). Bantam Book edition (ISBN 0-553-27556-9).

    January 16, 2014