Word Pet Peeve: Nauseated vs. Nauseous
Sep. 6th, 2010 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annundrielWhen you feel sick to your stomach, about to vomit, you feel nauseated.
When something is nauseous, it causes nausea.
If you feel nauseous, you are essentially saying you cause other people nausea.
Thank you, Dr. McD, for explaining the difference so clearly back in school.
ETA: Usage note from my dictionary, The American Heritage Collage Dictionary, Fourth Edition:
When something is nauseous, it causes nausea.
If you feel nauseous, you are essentially saying you cause other people nausea.
Thank you, Dr. McD, for explaining the difference so clearly back in school.
ETA: Usage note from my dictionary, The American Heritage Collage Dictionary, Fourth Edition:
Traditional critics have insisted that nauseous is appropriately used only to mean "causing nausea" and that it is incorrect to use it to mean "affected with nausea," as in Roller coasters make me nauseous. In this example, nauseated was preferred by 61 percent of the Usage Panel in the 1999 survey. Curiously, though, only 24 percent of the Panelists preferred using nauseous in the sentence The children looked a little green from too many candy apples and nauseous rides. Since there is a lot of evidence to show that nauseous is widely used to mean "feeling sick," it appears that people using nauseous mainly in the sense in which it is considered incorrect. In its "correct" sense it is being supplanted by nauseating.
