Definition of "belch"

'Tis not a year or two shows us a man:They are all but stomachs, and we all but food;To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,They belch us.

c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene iv]

When I an amorous kiss design'd, / I belch'd a hurricane of wind.

1746, attributed to Jonathan Swift, "A Love Poem form a Physician to his Mistress,"

She eats too fast, belches behind a cupped hand, smiles.

1980, J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Penguin, 19982, Chapter 2, p. 41

Within the gates of hell sat Sin and Death,In counterview within the gates, that nowStood open wide, belching outrageous flameFar into Chaos […] .

1667, John Milton, “Book X”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […]; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, lines 230-33

Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire,Black clouds he belch'd, and flakes of livid fire.

1697, Virgil, “The Eighth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […]

[…] beneath him sound like waves on a desert shoreThe voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money,That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning firesOf lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth.

1793, William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion‎, lines 30–33

I sing the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will.Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!

1914, Harry Kemp, I sing the Battle‎

I grasped the cold slimy rung. My feet slithered and scrunched on stranded things. Next rung...the next and next...endless horrible rungs, hissing and smells belching from under the wharf.

1941, Emily Carr, chapter 18, in Klee Wyck‎

A book entitled Emerging Indonesia has on its cover photographs of a sunrise over palm trees, bent women in coolie hats transplanting rice, a wooden bull burning at a Balinese cremation, and a liquid nitrogen plant belching black smoke into a clear, undefiled tropical sky.

1996, Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Harvard University Press, page 141

Porters would no longer be drunk with Belch

c. 1699, John Dennis, letter to Mr. Collier