Tip of the week: Can you feel nauseous?

I’ve been writing a manuscript of confusable words recently and have been scouring confusable word lists for research. One pair that I was surprised to find is still an issue is nauseated/nauseous. I was brought up speaking New England’s dialect of American English, and I was taught to say “I feel nauseous” when I wanted to let people know that I felt queasy and might vomit. It wasn’t even something my stickler nuns attacked. Surely that made it acceptable. But even in new books, that usage is attacked. Are the attackers right?

Let’s start with the root word: nausea. The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) defines nausea as “a feeling of sickness in the stomach characterized by an urge to vomit” or a “strong aversion; disgust.” The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology notes that nausea first entered English before 1425 with the first definition.

Chambers goes on to say that nauseate entered English in 1640. It first meant “to feel nausea,” and in 1654 it picked up a second meaning: “to cause nausea.” When you are nauseated, you feel like you might vomit. This usage is still active today, if less common that it once was:

A powerful antioxidant, ginger works by blocking the effects of serotonin, a chemical produced by both the brain and stomach when you’re nauseated, and by stopping the production of free radicals, another cause of upset in your stomach. —Prevention, 2007

Nauseous entered English in 1604, meaning “inclined to nausea,” and added the meaning “causing nausea” in 1612:

After the involuntary shrinking consequent on the first nauseous whiff —Dracula,1897 (as quoted in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage)

This second definition is the one that some English speakers would like to maintain as nauseous’s only definition. But as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU), Chambers, and other resources point out, in the middle of the 20th century, nauseous picked up another meaning: “affected by nausea, nauseated.”

When confronted with a math problem, the sufferer has sweaty palms, is nauseous, has heart palpitations, and experiences paralysis of thought. —Education, 2006

Many usage experts have denied (and still deny) this usage since its first appearance. We already have a word that means “affected by nausea,” they claim, as if a meaning could be applied to only one word, no synonyms allowed. Reading would cease to be as pleasurable were synonyms never allowed.

Language users are free to play with language, enriching it as they do so. If enough people use a word in a new way, then the word adds the new meaning to itself. It becomes a legitimate usage. It works the other way, too: if enough people stop using a word in a specific way, that definition becomes obsolete. You only have to browse through a historical dictionary to see how often the latter happens.

The way people consistently use nauseous has changed. Says MWDEU, “at present, nauseous is most often used as a predicate adjective meaning ‘nauseated’ literally.” Its older sense, “causing nausea,” is declining, with nauseating more often taking its place. Nauseated is still used in its original sense, but it’s used less often than it once was; again, nauseating is taking over its meaning.

The way of language is one of continual change, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. Nauseous has been increasingly used to mean “affected by nausea” over the last 70 years or so, even in some formal copy. Unless you’re dealing with copy for particularly persnickety readers, you can let your writer use nauseous to mean “affected by nausea.”