Bloat
collective noun /bləʊt/ — What you call a group of hippos — blunt, honest, and slightly comic.
Definition
The collective noun for a group of hippopotamuses resting together in or near water. Hippos spend most of the day submerged, their bodies buoyant and expanded.
Beyond the definition
Blunt, honest, and slightly comic — bloat captures the hippo's relationship with water perfectly. They don't swim so much as float, their enormous bodies becoming strangely graceful underwater. The word doesn't flatter them. It doesn't need to.
Origin & history
From Old Norse blautr — soft with liquid. A bloat refers to the swollen, water-logged appearance of hippos as they mass together in rivers and waterholes during the heat of the day.
Example sentences
Illustrative sentences for learning, not verified community posts or sourced quotations.
The bloat of hippos barely moved all morning, submerged to their eyes in the brown river.
A bloat of thirty hippos claimed every inch of the waterhole by midday.
Beneath the surface, the bloat rearranged itself in slow, powerful silence.
How to use it
Follow this entry’s examples for grammatical form and sentence placement.
Choose “Bloat” when the meaning fits your context: The collective noun for a group of hippopotamuses resting together in or near water. Hippos spend most of the day submerged, their bodies buoyant and expanded.
Synonyms
Related words
Word in the Wild
Illustrative story: an imagined scene, not a documented event or interview.
A game ranger described the moment she understood hippos properly. She had been on a boat in the Okavango, studying the water, and had gradually become aware that several of the boulders were not boulders.
Twenty-three hippos in four feet of water, motionless in the midday heat. Entirely submerged except for ears and nostrils. Moving underwater with a slow, gravity-defying grace that bore no relationship to anything their bulk should have suggested possible.
"A bloat," she said, when asked. "Which is exactly right. But also entirely wrong. There's nothing bloated about what they do in the water."
Questions about this word
What does "Bloat" mean?
Bloat is collective noun meaning: What you call a group of hippos — blunt, honest, and slightly comic.. The collective noun for a group of hippopotamuses resting together in or near water. Hippos spend most of the day submerged, their bodies buoyant and expanded.
Where does the word "Bloat" come from?
From Old Norse blautr — soft with liquid. A bloat refers to the swollen, water-logged appearance of hippos as they mass together in rivers and waterholes during the heat of the day.