scaturient

Scaturient is an adjective that describes something as “overflowing” or “gushing,” like a river. It can also refer to something as emotionally “overflowing,” that is, effusive.

Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve never heard this word. Scaturient is pretty obscure, largely found in older texts. It’s often used to describe natural forces, especially rushing water or abundant life.

Example: Upon inspection, the forest’s river was scaturient with newly hatched tadpoles.

Scaturient comes from the Latin verb scatūr(r)īre, meaning “to gush or flow out, bubble up.” It is recorded in English by the end of the 1600s. The word scaturient is rare.

If you’ve never heard of scaturient, here’s a great example of how to use it from Hartley Coleridge’s 1833 Biographia Borealis: “The trees, and the flowers, and the butterflies, the green and fragrant earth, all teeming and scaturient with new species.”

Scaturient lends itself to descriptions of things that are spilling outward or are profuse in amount. The term has extended to describe metaphorical gushes of emotion, for example, scaturient feelings of love.

What are some other forms of scaturient?

• scaturience (noun)

What are some synonyms for scaturient?

• teeming
• swarming
• copious
• abundant
• torrential
• demonstrative
• histrionic

What are some words scaturient may be commonly confused with?

• scattering
• scatty
• scatological
• esurient

If you hear this in contemporary conversation, you’re talking with someone with some real vocab power. You might even describe their vocabulary as … scaturient.

Today, it’s sometimes used as a more poetic way to characterize “overflowing” emotions.

I knew this was slated to be an irksome revolution around the sun, but the scope of it scaturient blahness is still fairly impressive.

— amuirin (@amuirin) January 29, 2010

 

me, the bees, the flowers and the trees are teeming and scaturient of love today

— 🔮 (@fatbellybri) May 20, 2019

Occasionally, scaturient is used for humorous effect, as when applied to too-full email inboxes.

My inbox is scaturient ! Make it stop!!

— Darren Mackiewicz (@WhereWhy) August 25, 2009

In older texts, as noted, scaturient is especially used to describe powerful rivers or a place teeming with life.

Did you know we’ve featured scaturient as a Word of the Day?

Which of the following is an antonym for scaturient?

A. saturated
B. bounteous
C. barren
D. over-the-top