Puky

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Extremely unpleasant and sickening, provoking a strong feeling of disgust or the urge to vomit
2. Describing something so repellent that it turns the stomach and makes a person feel revolted
3. Characterizing anything that is nauseating or offensive to the senses in a way that causes real revulsion

Etymology: "Puky" is a plain formation: the verb "puke" with the suffix "-y", which turns a noun or verb into an adjective meaning "characterised by" or "resembling" the base. Something puky is therefore sickly, nauseating, or smelling of vomit. The adjective is a near relative of the German-speaking world's "pukig" in the Low German dialects, which carries the same sense of sickly or ailing, so the two words likely grew from the same root in parallel rather than one borrowing from the other. The verb "puke" itself is the older and more fundamental piece, and the source does not give it a dated first use, so the story here rests on the suffix and the shared Germanic sense. The word's main interest is that it shows how a bodily act became a description of a sickly quality: the adjective carries the physical nausea of the verb into a general sense of something distasteful.

Synonyms: nauseating, sickening, queasy