fart
/fɑːt
/informal
verb [no object]
1Emit wind from the anus.The proletarians were said to have bodies that were not sublimated, which farted and belched and emitted all sorts of cacophonous noises....
- Basically, they spend their days farting, chewing grass and staring at passing cars with expressions of vague bewilderment.
- Start to watch one of those programmes where non-celebrities, normal people, fall over, get wet or film their children farting in the bath.
2 (fart around (or British also fart about)) Waste time on silly or trivial things.How am I supposed to waste time farting around when people keep killing each other....
- My publishers are farting around at the moment but they will bring it out in a kind of lavishly tooled arty-farty volume.
- Whilst we, their former colonial oppressors, are still farting around with bits of paper, pencils and tin boxes - they've just got on with it and held their first totally electronic national election.
noun
1An emission of wind from the anus.We know also that farts are warm (not hot), so I'll add that: a fart is warm wind emitted from the anus....
- Nature decided to put an abrupt end to our finger-pointing conspiracy theorists' dialogue, when a deafening fart emptied from the anus of someone soundly asleep downstairs.
- If I can remember what I learned in junior high school regarding tornadoes, they're some kind of thing which is made up of wind, like a fart but only much more powerful.
2A boring or contemptible person: he was such an old fart...
- I'm a boring old fart, who values her money, and won't buy him a brand new shirt to chop holes in so he can look like a pirate.
- I'm being a boring old fart so I'm in my room getting ready to go to bed.
- On television, there was some boring old fart in a suit talking about the dangers of credit growth.
Origin
Old English (recorded in the verbal noun feorting 'farting') of Germanic origin; related to German farzen, furzen.
feisty from late 19th century:
A small farting dog is the surprising idea behind the word feisty, meaning ‘spirited and exuberant’. It comes from the earlier and now obsolete word feist or fist meaning ‘small dog’, from fisting cur or fisting hound. This was a derogatory term for a lapdog, deriving from the old verb fist, meaning ‘to break wind’. Fist may also be the source of fizzle, which in the 16th century meant ‘to break wind quietly’. Fart itself goes back to Old English times and was formerly a more respectable word than it is now—Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Canterbury Tales.