fatten

Verb

1. To cause (a person or animal) to be fat or fatter.
   • We must fatten the turkey in time for Thanksgiving.
   • And if the mat[t]er be too little, the vertue of digestion fayleth, and the bodye is dryed, and if the matter and meate be moderate, the meats is well digested, and the bodye fattened, the heart comforted, kinde heate...
   • In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents, she was everyone’s ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity. - 1969, Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,...
2. To become fat or fatter.
   • He gradually fattened in the five years after getting married.
   • The Laplanders, possessing a country where corn will not grow, make bread of the inner bark of trees; and Linneus reports, that swine there fatten on that food […] - 1774, Henry Home, Lord Kames, “Sketches of the...
   • His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk […] - 1916 December 29, James Joyce, chapter III, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young...

   Synonyms: gain weight put on weight

3. To make thick or thicker (often something containing paper, especially money).
   • “You horrible old man, you’ve always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! […]” - 1920, Sinclair Lewis, chapter XXXIII, in Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace...
   • […] stirred by the air / That freshened from the window, these ascended ⁠/ In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, / Flung their smoke into the laquearia, / Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. - 1922...
   • The news spread, about the bastard caterer who was toying with their religious sentiments, trampling on their beliefs, polluting their beings, all for the sake of fattening his miserable wallet. - 1995, Rohinton Mistry,...
4. To become thick or thicker.
   • A broad river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second later, cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a hundred...
   • The pencil-line of light by his feet fattened to a bar. Alan looked around and saw Norris Ridgewick. - 1991, Stephen King, Needful Things:
5. To make (soil) fertile and fruitful.
   • to fatten land
   • 1612, Joseph Hall, Contemplations vpon the Principall Passages of the Holie Storie, London: Sa. Macham, Volume 1, Book 4, p. 333, As the riuer of Nilus was to Egypt in steed of heauen to moisten and fatten the earth; so...
   • The earth is fattened with our dead; She swallows more and doth not cease: Therefore her wine and oil increase And her sheaves are not numberèd; - 1850, Christina Rossetti, “A Testimony”, in Goblin Market and Other...

   Synonyms: enrich

6. To become fertile and fruitful.
   • These hostile Fields shall fatten with thy Blood. - 1700, “The First Book of Homer’s Ilias”, in John Dryden, transl., Fables Ancient and Modern, London: Jacob Tonson, page 205: