Someone described as swole is extremely muscular. In other words, they have a physique enhanced by bodybuilding exercises.

// Her New Year’s resolution was to get swole, so she signed up with a personal trainer and committed to working out every day.

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“It’s possible to build muscle in a couple of half-hour workouts a week, provided you train both smart and hard. Building muscle has a lot more benefits than just making you look swole, though, for both men and women. Having more muscle and strength makes everyday activities, be that carrying shopping loads or lifting your suitcase into an overhead compartment, easier.” — Rachel Hosie, Business Insider, 25 Mar. 2024

If someone said you were swole, would you know how to respond? If you’re unfamiliar with the word, you might think your face is swollen or check yourself for signs of puffiness. If you know the word, however, you’d know you’re in fact looking quite fit and muscular and might respond with a simple “Thank you for noticing.” Often used on social media, swole has come to be a complimentary term for those with a physique enhanced by weightlifting and bodybuilding exercises. The word isn’t exactly new—swole goes back to Middle English as a past tense and past participle of swell meaning “to enlarge,” “to bulge,” or “to puff out” (literally and figuratively). In the late 1980s the sense of “having well-defined muscles” emerged as a regional variant of swollen in African American English. Rapper Ice-T used the adjective in his 1991 song “The Tower”: “And hit the weight pile / The brothers was swole.” In addition, it was applied as a verb to describe becoming ripped or cut, as when the late Tupac Shakur applied it in his 1997 song “When I Get Free”: “… did push-ups till I swole up.”