belch

Etymology

From Middle English belchen, from Old English bielċan, from Proto-Germanic *balkijaną, *belkaną, probably ultimately of imitative origin. Related to Dutch balken (“to bray”), Middle Low German belken (“to shout”), Low German bölken (“to shout, bark”), Old English bealċettan (“to utter, send forth”). See also English bolk, boak.

verb

1. (transitive, intransitive) To expel (gas) loudly from the stomach through the mouth.
   1746, attributed to Jonathan Swift, "A Love Poem form a Physician to his Mistress," http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14353/pg14353-images.html When I an amorous kiss design'd, I belch'd a hurricane of wind.
   She eats too fast, belches behind a cupped hand, smiles. 1980, J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Penguin, 19982, Chapter 2, p. 41
2. (transitive, intransitive) To eject or emit (something) with spasmodic force or noise.
   […]beneath him sound like waves on a desert shore The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money, That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth. 1793, William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, lines 30–33
   I sing the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will. Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still! 1914, Harry Kemp, I sing the Battle
   I grasped the cold slimy rung. My feet slithered and scrunched on stranded things. Next rung...the next and next...endless horrible rungs, hissing and smells belching from under the wharf. 1941, Emily Carr, chapter 18, in Klee Wyck
   A book entitled Emerging Indonesia has on its cover photographs of a sunrise over palm trees, bent women in coolie hats transplanting rice, a wooden bull burning at a Balinese cremation, and a liquid nitrogen plant belching black smoke into a clear, undefiled tropical sky. 1996, Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press, page 141

noun

1. The sound one makes when belching.
2. (obsolete) Malt liquor.
   c. 1699, John Dennis, letter to Mr. Collier Porters would no longer be drunk with Belch