▪ I. bile
(baɪl)
[a. F. bile, ad. L. bīlis.]
1. The fluid secreted by the liver, and poured into the duodenum, as an aid to the digestive process. It is bitter, of a brownish yellow colour, passing sometimes into green, and of a highly complex structure. (It was one of the ‘four humours’ of early physiology, and was, till the beginning of the 18th c., commonly termed choler.)
| 1665 G. Thomson Med. Ignor. 147 Blood, Bile, Phlegme and Melancholy. 1700 Dryden Cock & Fox 147 These foolish Fancies..Are certain Symptoms..Of boiling Choler, and abounding Bile. 1732 Arbuthnot Rules of Diet 267 Livers of Animals, because of the Bile which they contain. 1810 Henry Elem. Chem. (1826) II. 441. 1861 Hulme tr. Moquin-Tandon ii. iii. iii. 95 Bile..is secreted by the liver, and is received into a special receptacle termed the gall-bladder. |
b. Excess or derangement of the bile.
| 1803 Pitt in G. Rose Diaries (1860) II. 10, I am..quite free both from gout and bile. |
2. fig. Anger, ill temper, peevishness. Cf. choler, gall, spleen.
| 1836 Marryat Midsh. Easy viii, His bile was raised by this parade and display in a lad. 1838 Hallam Hist. Lit. I. i. iv. §45. 289 After all this bile against those whom the royal bird represents. |
3. black bile = atrabilis, choler adust, or melancholy, the fourth of the ‘humours’ of early physiology; see atrabile.
| 1797 Godwin Enquirer i. x. 88 He had been..accumulating..black bile. |
4. Comb. and attrib., as bile-cell, bile-cyst, bile-duct, etc.; bile-pigment, one of the colouring substances of bile; bile-stone, a calculus formed in the gall-bladder, a gall-stone.
| 1674 Grew Anat. Trunks iii. ii. §17 In the Liver, it were hard to say, which is a Blood-Vessel, and which is a Bile-Vessel..if it were not for the Contents of them both. 1774 E. Darwin in Phil. Trans. 346 The bile-duct was tied before it was taken out of the body. 1796 ― Zoon. ii. 4 Where these bile-stones are too large to pass. 1880 J. W. Legg Bile 87 In health no bile-pigment can be detected in the blood. |
▪ II. bile
obs. f. boil tumour, and build.