different between fatten vs ratten

English

Etymology

From fat +? -en.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?fæt?n/

Verb

fatten (third-person singular simple present fattens, present participle fattening, simple past and past participle fattened)

1. (transitive) To cause (a person or animal) to be fat or fatter.
   • 1582, Stephen Batman (translator), Batman vppon Bartholome his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum, London: Thomas East, Book 6, Chapter 25, p. 82,^[1]

     And if the mat[t]er be too little, the vertue of digestion fayleth, and the bodye is dryed, and if the matter and meate be moderate, the meats is well digested, and the bodye fattened, the heart comforted, kinde heate made more, the humors made temperate, & wit made cleere:

   • 1969, Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010, Part 1, Chapter 4,^[2]

     In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents, she was everyone’s ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity.

2. (intransitive, of a person or animal) To become fat or fatter.

   Synonyms: gain weight, put on weight

   • 1774, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, Dublin: James Williams, Volume 1, Sketch 2, pp. 49-50,^[3]

     The Laplanders, possessing a country where corn will not grow, make bread of the inner bark of trees; and Linneus reports, that swine there fatten on that food […]

   • 1916, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 3,^[4]

     His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk […]

   • 1955, J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man, New York: Dell, 1965, Chapter 6, p. 43,^[5]

     Mushrooms fatten in the warm September rain.

3. (transitive) To make thick or thicker (something containing paper, often money).
   • 1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Chapter 33, p. 401,^[6]

     “You horrible old man, you’ve always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! […] ”

   • 1995, Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, London: Faber & Faber, 1997, Part 5, p. 241,^[7]

     The news spread, about the bastard caterer who was toying with their religious sentiments, trampling on their beliefs, polluting their beings, all for the sake of fattening his miserable wallet.

   • 2000, Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, New York: Random House, Part 3, Chapter 2, p. 177,^[8]

     It was the impotence of the money, and of all the pent-up warlike fancies that had earned it, to do anything but elaborate the wardrobe and fatten the financial portfolios of the owners of Empire Comics that so frustrated and enraged him.

4. (intransitive) To become thick or thicker.
   • 1929, Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, London: Heinemann, 1930, Part 2, Chapter 22,^[9]

     A broad river of white paper rushed constantly up from the cylinder and leaped into a mangling chaos of machinery whence it emerged a second later, cut, printed, folded and stacked, sliding along a board with a hundred others in a fattening sheaf.
5. (transitive) To make (soil) fertile and fruitful.

   Synonym: enrich

   to fatten land

   • 1612, Joseph Hall, Contemplations vpon the Principall Passages of the Holie Storie, London: Sa. Macham, Volume 1, Book 4, p. 333,^[10]

     As the riuer of Nilus was to Egypt in steed of heauen to moisten and fatten the earth; so their confidence was more in it then in heauen;

   • 1850, Christina Rossetti, “A Testimony” in Goblin Market and Other Poems, London: Macmillan, 1862, p. 163,^[11]

     The earth is fattened with our dead;

     She swallows more and doth not cease:

     Therefore her wine and oil increase

     And her sheaves are not numberèd;

6. (intransitive) To become fertile and fruitful.
   • 1700, John Dryden (translator), “The First Book of Homer’s Ilias” in Fables Ancient and Modern, London: Jacob Tonson, p. 205,^[12]

     These hostile Fields shall fatten with thy Blood.

Derived terms

• fattener
• fattening
• fatten up
• nonfattened
• unfattenable
• unfattened

Translations

Dutch

Pronunciation

Noun

fatten

1. plural of fat

English

Etymology

From Provincial English ratten (“rat”), i.e. to do mischief like a rat.

Verb

ratten (third-person singular simple present rattens, present participle rattening, simple past and past participle rattened)

1. (obsolete, Northern England) To sabotage machinery or tools as part of an industrial dispute, particularly the tools of a workman who went against the union.
   • 1867, Report Presented to the Trades Unions Commissioners by the Examiners Appointed to Inquire Into Acts of Intimidation, Outrage, Or Wrong Alleged to Have Been Promoted, Encouraged, Or Connived at by Trades Unions in the Town of Sheffield, Great Britain. Royal Commission on Trades Unions. G.E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1867. p. 225:

     Did you also employ them to ratten people if they had broken any rules of your society, for instance, by having too many apprentices?

   • 1947, Ivor John Carnegie Brown, Say The Word, p 100:

     […] derived from the sabot or shoe beneath railway lines. The saboteur was thus a remover of metal shoes, a train-wrecker. I must leave it at that. Meanwhile why not restore ratten to its old place in the Trade Union vocabulary, that is if, in these times of scant, we must endure any such wanton hindrance of the works?

Anagrams

• Arnett, attern, natter, tarten, treant

Dutch

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -?t?n

Noun

ratten

1. Plural form of rat

Anagrams

• natter, tarten

Middle English

Verb

ratten

1. to tear apart
   • 1402, "The Reply of Friar Daw Topias":

     renden and ratyn

References

• “ratten, v.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

Swedish

Noun

ratten

1. definite singular of ratt

Anagrams

• tanter, tentar