Word.ws English Dictionary

expectorate

/ɪkˈspɛktəɹeɪt/

expectorate verb: to cough up fluid from the lungs.

expectorate: Person's silhouette exhaling a cloud of fine particles
Photo by Torben Gettermann on Unsplash

Verb

expectorate (third-person singular simple present expectorates, present participle expectorating, simple past and past participle expectorated)

  1. (ambitransitive) To cough up fluid from the lungs.
    • These rules are equally applicable to pneumonia and perhaps also to bronchitis. It will, therefore, be best to call them, not rules for consumptives, but for all persons who cough and expectorate .1893, Popular Science Monthly (ed.), Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 42 (Jan 1893) — Notes
    • …the gap in his upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and admirable way.1876, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Chapter VI)
  2. (ambitransitive) To spit.

expectorate meaning in Kannada and Vietnamese

expectorate in Kannada

ಕೆಮ್ಮಿ ತುಪ್ಪು, ಉಗಿ

expectorate in Vietnamese

to cough up fluid from the lungs
khạc đờm, khạc, nhổ

Forms of expectorate

third-person singular presentexpectorates
present participleexpectorating
past participleexpectorated
pastexpectorated

Origin of expectorate

From Latin expectorātus, past participle of expectorō (“(only figurative) banish from the mind; (post-classical) expel from the breast)”), from ex (“out of”) + pectus (“the breast”).

Words formed from expectorate

Questions about expectorate

What does expectorate mean?
Expectorate means to cough up fluid from the lungs.
What is expectorate in Kannada?
Expectorate in Kannada is ಕೆಮ್ಮಿ ತುಪ್ಪು, ಉಗಿ. See Expectorate meaning in Kannada.
What part of speech is expectorate?
Expectorate is a verb.
How do you pronounce expectorate?
Expectorate is pronounced /ɪkˈspɛktəɹeɪt/.
What is the past tense of expectorate?
The past tense of expectorate is expectorated.

Words near expectorate in the dictionary

  1. expection
  2. expections
  3. expective
  4. expectorant
  5. expectorants
  6. expectorate
  7. expectorated
  8. expectorates
  9. expectorating
  10. expectoration
  11. expectorations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: expectorate (page history and authors); expectorate (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-expectorate.ogg.

Cite this entry: “expectorate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/expectorate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.