a. [ad. L. turgid-us swollen, inflated, f. turgēre to swell: see -ID1.]
1. Swollen, distended, puffed out.
1620. Venner, Via Recta, iv. 82. You shall commonly see them … to haue turgid, and strouting-out bellies.
1660. Boyle, New Exp. Phys. Mech., v. 52. A Bladder, but moderately fill’d with Air and strongly ty’d, being … held near the Fire, grew exceedingly turgid and hard.
1669. J. Rose, Eng. Vineyard (1675), 33. Proud and turgid buds.
1674. Grew, Anat. Trunks, II. i. § 15. The Bladders … being swelled up and turgid with Sap.
1776. Withering, Brit. Plants (1796), III. 618. Anthyllis. Cup swoln and turgid; inclosing the legumen.
1797. M. Baillie, Morb. Anat. (1807), 456. The veins of the pia mater have been found turgid with blood.
1846. Ellis, Elgin Marb., I. 102. Turgid muscles of the breast.
1860. Maury, Phys. Geog. Sea (Low), xi. § 523. This condensation is followed by a turgid intumescence.
fig. 1692. Bentley, Boyle Lect., ix. 329. Their Imaginations turgid and pregnant with the glorious Ideas.
1697. Evelyn, Numism., iii. 82. That turgid Vanity and gross Adulation.
2. fig. in reference to language: Inflated, grandiloquent, pompous, bombastic.
1725. Watts, Logic, II. iii. III. § 6. Some … have a violent and turgid manner both of talking and thinking.
1762. Foote, Orators, II. Wks. 1799, I. 219. The frothy, the turgid, the calm, and the clamorous [declaimers].
1781. Gibbon, Decl. & F., xvii. II. 40. The advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric.
1856. R. A. Vaughan, Mystics (1860), I. 97. His verbose and turgid style, too, is destitute of all genuine feeling.
