Bloater

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A fish, typically herring, preserved by smoking that is common in British cuisine ; a person who is noticeably fat or stout in appearance
2. A herring prepared by smoking and drying, often eaten as a delicacy ; an individual characterized by excess body weight or plumpness
3. A kind of fish treated by cold smoking to preserve it ; someone who is corpulent or thickset in body shape

Etymology: The bloater is a fish that was named for how it looks after treatment rather than for anything it does in the water. Herring, usually, are salted lightly and then cold-smoked, and during this process the flesh and belly swell out, which is where the name comes from: the fish is "bloated" by its preparation. The word is simply "bloat" with the agent-forming suffix "-er," so a bloater is literally a thing that bloats. The same formation produced the word's second sense, applied to people. Someone described as a bloater is corpulent or thickset, with a swollen, puffed-out look much like the fish after smoking. The fish sense and the body sense were built from the same base, so the two meanings share a single image of something filled out and distended.

Synonyms: herring, fish