Now unless you’re a medical professional, or a big old know-it-all, then chances are you haven’t come across this word before. But I can almost certainly guarantee that it’s happened to you before. Because borborygmus is the technical term for when your stomach rumbles.
Etymologically speaking, the term ‘borborygmus’ has been around a long time – since 1724 to be very specific. It comes from the Greek word borboryzein which means, unsurprisingly, ‘to rumble’. The nice thing about it is that people think that it’s probably onomatopoeic. Go on, say it out loud. Sounds a bit like a stomach gurgle, right?
Borborygmus isn’t entirely confined to medical circles. It sometimes turns up as an adjective – borborygmic – generally used to describe noisy plumbing. Vladimir Nabokov (yes, he of pervy ‘Lolita’ fame) used it in his lesser-known (to me at least) novel ‘Ada’ (which, it turns out, is also pervy, this time in an incest-y way):
“All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.”
Borborygmus facts: The sound your stomach makes when it rumbles actually comes from your small intestine – the noise is produced by muscle contractions (or peristalsis), as food moves through it.