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.
Synonyms
Related words
Word in the Wild
See how this word appears in life, language and stories.
Illustrative sentences and imagined stories for learning — not verified sightings, interviews, or sourced quotations.
Word in focus
A bloat of hippopotamuses
A group of hippopotamuses resting together at the water's edge.
Here, “bloat” names the whole gathering. Notice the animals together rather than looking for one individual with that name. The photograph illustrates the group; it is not evidence that this particular scene inspired the expression.
Image credit: Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0 (license)
Resized and converted to WebP; displayed with a fitted crop.