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swollen

adjectiveverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈswəʊ.lən//
  • United Kingdom//ˈswɒ.lən//
  • United States//ˈswoʊ.lən//

Protuberant or abnormally distended (as by injury or disease).

adjective

  1. 1

    Protuberant or abnormally distended (as by injury or disease).

    swollen ankle

    swollen knee

    swollen salaries

    swollen thumb

Etymology

From Middle English swollen, i-swolle, y-swolle, yswolle, ȝeswollen, from Old English swollen, ġeswollen, from Proto-Germanic *swullanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *swellaną (“to swell”). Cognate with West Frisian swollen (“swollen”), Dutch gezwollen (“swollen”), German geschwollen (“swollen”), Swedish svullen (“swollen”).

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of swellpast participle of swell

Forms

comparative
more swollen
superlative
most swollen
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).