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bulk

Pronunciation: /bʌlk/

The English word “bulk” has 19 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Size, specifically, volume.
  2. Any huge body or structure.
  3. The major part of something.
  4. Majority, balance.
  5. Gist.
  6. Dietary fibre.
  7. Unpackaged goods when transported in large volumes, e.g. coal, ore, or grain.
  8. A cargo or any items moved or communicated in the manner of cargo.
  9. Excess body mass, especially muscle.
  10. A period where one tries to gain muscle.
  11. A hypothetical higher-dimensional space within which our own four-dimensional universe may exist.
  12. The body.

adjective

  1. Being large in size, mass, or volume (of goods, etc.).
  2. Total.

verb

  1. To appear or seem to be, as to bulk or extent.
  2. To grow in size; to swell or expand.
  3. To gain body mass by means of diet, exercise, etc.
  4. To put or hold in bulk.
  5. To add bulk to; to bulk out.

Etymology

From Middle English bulk, bolke (“a heap, cargo, hold; heap; bulge”), borrowed from Old Norse búlki (“the freight or the cargo of a ship”), from Proto-Germanic *bulkô (“beam, pile, heap”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰelǵ- (“beam, pile, prop”). Compare Icelandic búlkast (“to be bulky”), Swedish dialectal bulk (“a bunch”), Danish bulk (“bump, knob”). Conflated with Middle English bouk (“belly,…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.