vomit

The Latin verb vomere meant to vomit, to discharge, to eject. Roman physicians used it clinically, without apology, and Pliny the Elder in his Natural History of 77 CE listed foods that provoked vomiting as useful tools for purging a bad meal. The noun vomitus named the act and the substance both. English borrowed the noun in the 14th century directly from medical Latin, skipping any softening detour through French.

The Latin root descends from Proto-Indo-European wemh-, a root that names the same bodily event in Sanskrit (vamati, he vomits), Greek (emein, to vomit), and Old Norse (vama, nausea). This spread tells us the word is older than any of those languages, carried forward because the body's behavior does not change and humans have always needed to name it. Greek went its own way phonologically, dropping the initial consonant, which is why English has both vomit from Latin and emetic from Greek for the same phenomenon.

Roman architects built vomitoria into their amphitheaters: the wide passageways that disgorged crowds onto the streets after a gladiatorial show. The term was precise and literal, not metaphorical. A modern myth insists Romans used vomitoria as rooms where diners purged mid-meal to continue eating, but no Roman source describes this practice. The passageways simply did what the word said: they expelled people quickly and in large numbers.

The word remained unchanged in form and function across medieval Latin, entering Middle English around 1350 through medical texts and later through Chaucer's less clinical usage. By the 16th century, English writers used vomit freely in figurative contexts: preachers described sinners vomiting up confessions, poets described seas vomiting storms. The body's most undignified reflex had acquired a literary life entirely disproportionate to its origins.