v. [f. FAT a. + -EN5.]
1. trans. To make fat or plump. Also to fatten up. Usually: To feed (animals) for market, make fit to kill. Const. on.
1552. Huloet, Fatten or make fatte, crasso.
1622. Massinger, Virg. Mart. II. i.
| You snatch the meat out of the prisoner’s mouth, | |
| To fatten harlots. |
1632. Lithgow, Trav., III. 95.
| Did wandring Laton kindly entertaine; | |
| In spight of Juno, fatned with Joves balme. |
1745. trans. Columella’s Husb., VIII. i. Receptacles of such fowls as are shut up in coops, and fattened.
1777. Mad. D’Arblay, Early Diary (1889), II. 284. His legs … have been fattened up by the gout.
1849. Cobden, Speeches, 3. His idea seems to be that men in time of peace were only being fattened up for a speedy slaughter.
1853. Soyer, Pantropheon, 165. To fatten turkeys—every morning, for a month, give them mashed potatoes, mixed with buck-wheat flour, Indian corn, barley, or beans; a paste is made of it which they are left to eat as they please.
1873. Tristram, Moab, viii. 148. Innumberable white snails with the thickest of shells, and red caterpillars like those of the Emperor moth, with myriads of larks—the skylark, crested lark, short-toed, calandra, and others—in combined flocks fattening themselves upon them.
absol. 1650. J. Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis, 241. All Bodies may be made lean; but it is impossible to fatten, where, etc.
b. Said of the food.
c. 1590. Greene, Fr. Bacon, x. 59. Whose battling pastures fatten all my flockes.
1665. Sir T. Herbert, Trav. (1677), 299. More corpulent than lean, Wine and Music, fattens them [Persian women].
1781. Gibbon, Decl. & F., III. 213. The forests of Lucania, whose acorns fattened large droves of wild hogs.
1834. Brit. Husb., III. xiii. 59. The same food is given … to fatten cows or oxen.
c. transf. and fig. To fatten into: to bring into a certain state by pampering (rare). To fatten out: to drive out by fattening.
1566. Drant, Hor. Sat., II. vi.
| And praye him, for to make me sheepe, and cattle verye fatte, | |
| And, for to fatten all I haue, excepte my witte alone. |
1634. Sir T. Herbert, Trav. (1638), 235. Choosing rather to fatten themselves by a contented Notion, than by curious inquisition to perplex their other recreations.
1784. Cowper, Task, IV. 504.
| Th’ excise is fatten’d with the rich result | |
| Of all this riot. |
1840. Arnold, Let., in Stanley, Life (1881), II. ix. 163. It is then quite too late to try to fatten them [men] into obedience: other parts of their nature have learnt to desire, and will have their desire gratified.
1848. Lowell, Biglow P., Poems, 1890, II. 36. John Bull has suffered the idea of the Invisible to be very much fattened out of him.
2. intr. To grow or become fat. Const. † in, on. † Of a letter type: To become thicker. Obs.
1676. Moxon, Print. Lett., 48. How the Belly fattens downwards, you may best see by the Paterns themselves.
1695. Dryden, Juvenal, xiv. 210.
| The good Old man and Thrifty Husewife spent | |
| Their Days in Peace, and Fatten’d with Content. |
1712. Granville, Poems, To Mrs. Higgons, 100.
| Tygers and Wolves shall in the Ocean breed, | |
| The Whale and Dolphin fatten on the Mead. |
1745. E. Haywood, The Female Spectator (1748), III. 132–3. If they throw off all womanhood, despite the softness of their sex, can behold whole provinces depopulated, and, for the sake of false glory, which is too often the appendix of royalty, rejoice and fatten in the blood of slaughtered millions.
1755. The World, No. 113, 27 Feb., ¶ 12. I therefore propose to you, that from this day forwards, we, severally endeavour by all possible means, you to fatten, and I to waste, till we can meet at the medium of eighteen stone.
1790–1811. Coombe, Devil upon Two Sticks (1817), III. 271. After having, for some years, fattened in the ruin of others, he was at length ruined himself.
1813. Shelley, Q. Mab, I. 273.
| Yet not the meanest worm | |
| That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead | |
| Less shares thy eternal breath. |
1854. Jrnl. R. Agric. Soc., XV. I. 252. The ewes readily fatten.
1638. Sir R. Baker, trans. Letters of Mounsieur de Balzac, II. 13. Methinkes, Sir, shee fattens and grows gracefull with these prayses you give her.
1761–2. Hume, Hist. Eng. (1806), IV. lvii. 357. Such persons, who fatten on the calamities of their country.
1813. Shelley, Q. Mab, III. 108.
| Those gilded flies | |
| That, basking in the sunshine of a court, | |
| Fatten on its corruption! |
1867. Freeman, Norm. Conq. (1876), I. v. 318. Foreigners who … were to fatten on English estates and honours.
3. trans. To enrich (the soil) with nutritious or stimulating elements; to fertilize.
1563. Fulke, Meteors (1640), 50. Egypt hath the river Nilus, whose overflowings doe marveylously fatten the earth.
1583. Stubbes, Anat. Abus., II. (1882), 44. They are not ignorant also … what kind of dung is best to fatten the same againe.
1697. Dryden, Virg. Georg., I. 661.
| Just Heav’n thought good | |
| To fatten twice those Fields with Roman Blood. |
1709. Swift, Merlin’s Prophecy. One Kind of Stuff used to fatten Land is called Marle.
1809–10. Coleridge, The Friend (1865), 190. Genuine philanthropy, which, like the olive tree, sacred to concord and to wisdom, fattens not exhausts the soil from which it sprang, and in which it reamins rooted.
transf. and fig. 1697. Dryden, Juvenal Sat., III. 112.
| Obscene Orontes, diving under ground, | |
| Conveys his wealth to Tyber’s hungry shores, | |
| And fattens Italy with foreign whores. |
1707. Curios. in Husb. & Gard., 259. How efficacious Water is, when it has been fatten’d and heated by Dung.
1842. Tennyson, Golden Year, 34.
| When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps, | |
| But smit with freër light shall slowly melt | |
| In many streams to fatten lower lands. |
