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Definition
suffering indigestionor:
irritable or bad-tempered
or:
ugly or disgusting — especially of a shade of green
or:
relating to bile (a green digestive fluid)
- a bilious mood
- He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks.Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre
- One would think you were sick, or bilious, or something.Jack London -- Adventure
- A wisp of bilious green straw perched on her brow like a tropical bird.Sylvia Plath -- The Bell Jar
- "Miss Sarah," said Joe, "she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to buy pills, on account of being bilious.Charles Dickens -- Great Expectations
- When Dr. Meade told her she was pregnant, she was astounded, for she had been expecting a diagnosis of biliousness and over-wrought nerves.Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind
- The clouds were a bilious black veined with yellow and so low they seemed to compress the very earth.Nicholas Evans -- The Horse Whisperer
- I know he has been bilious, but I gave him—James Fenimore Cooper -- The Pioneers
- Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet.Toni Morrison -- The Bluest Eye
- The malady itself, one from which she had often suffered, a bilious fever—its cause therefore constitutional.Jane Austen -- Northanger Abbey
- A few bilious Britons there were who would not subscribe to this article of faith; but their objection was purely theoretical.Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit
- The sergeant said to the mestizo, 'You say you're bilious and can't see properly this morning.Graham Greene -- The Power and the Glory
- All day long I felt faint and bilious.Albert Camus -- The Stranger
- I was traveling through the part where the flat-footed, bilious, frog-sticker-toting Baptist biscuit-eaters live.Robert Penn Warren -- All the King's Men
- Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious!Herman Melville -- Moby Dick
- The green of the marble reflecting on their faces made them look bilious.Madeleine L'Engle -- A Wrinkle in Time
- Eragon's gut twisted, and he felt Saphira's own dread like a current of bilious water running through his mind.Christopher Paolini -- Brisingr
- This was rather too much for poor Mary; sometimes it made her bilious, sometimes it upset her gravity.George Eliot -- Middlemarch
- He was a small, shrivelled person, with bad teeth and a bilious air, an untidy gray beard, and savage eyes; his voice was high and his tone sarcastic.W. Somerset Maugham -- Of Human Bondage
- "He is a nervous, bilious subject," said Larrey, "and will not recover."Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace
bilious = ugly or disgusting
(Editor's note: The suffix "-ness" converts an adjective to a noun that means state or degree of. This is the same pattern you see in words like darkness, kindness, and coolness.)