flatus

Learned borrowing from Latin flātus (“blowing, wind, fart”).^[1][2] First attested in the 1660s–1670s.^[3]

• (General American, Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈfleɪtəs/^[1]

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (obsolete) IPA^(key): /ˈflætəs/
• Rhymes: -eɪtəs
• Hyphenation: fla‧tus

flatus (countable and uncountable, plural flatuses or flatus)

1. (uncountable) Gas generated in the digestive tract.

   This expression is utterly devoid of meaning, a mere flatus vocis.

2. (countable) Expulsion of such gas through the anus.

   Synonyms: flatulence, (vulgar) fart; see also Thesaurus:flatus

   • 1940, Walter Robson Humphries, William Ogilvie and the Projected Union of the Colleges, 1786–1787‎^[1], page 70:

     The point of quoque with illos is that those flatus, which have the right to be called winds, are also subject to laws like the winds themselves.

   • 2007, Harold John Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, →ISBN, page 373:

     A long summary of the work quickly appeared in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, which began with the theory Ten Rhijne’s had adapted from his Japanese colleagues: “This Author treating of the Gout, … asserts Flatus or Wind included between the Periosteum and the bone to be the genuine producer of those intolerable Pains … and that all the method of cure ought to tend toward the dispelling those Flatus”.¹⁵⁶

3. (obsolete) Morbid inflation or swelling.
   • 1730 April, Jonathan Swift, "A Vindication of the Lord Carteret", in Thomas Sheridan and John Nichols (Eds.), The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, Volume IX, J. Johnson &c. (1801), page 226,

     […] an incensed political surgeon, who is not in much renown for his mercy, upon great provocations: who, without waiting for his death, will flay and dissect him alive; and to the view of mankind lay open all the disordered cells of his brain, the venom of his tongue, the corruption of his heart, and spots and flatuses of his spleen: and all this for threepence.

• faults, futsal, ustalf

flatus

1. conditional of flati

From flō +‎ -tus.

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈfɫaː.tʊs]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈflaː.tus]

flātus m (genitive flātūs); fourth declension

1. blowing, breathing, snorting
2. breath; breeze
3. soul (breath of life)
4. fart

Fourth-declension noun.

• flātō

• “flatus”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “flatus”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891), An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• "flatus", in Charles du Fresne du Cange, Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• Carl Meißner; Henry William Auden (1894), Latin Phrase-Book‎^[2], London: Macmillan and Co.
  • to be favoured by Fortune; to bask in Fortune's smiles: fortunae favore or prospero flatu fortunae uti (vid. sect. VI. 8., note uti...)