The creative coinage infobesity is a blend based on the words information and obesity (the condition of being overweight in a way which is unhealthy). The noun obesity dates back to the early 17th century, and is based on the Latin form obesus meaning ‘having eaten until fat’. The related adjective obese came along about 40 years later, via a process technically known as back-formation (where a shorter word is formed from a longer word which already exists in a language). Mirroring this pattern, infobese is used as a counterpart adjective to infobesity.