the.com/gallbladder
A bile reservoir so optional, surgeons remove half a million yearly and nobody mourns it.
means The small, pear-shaped organ tucked under your liver that stores and concentrates bile until your gut needs it to break down fat.
from A plain English compound: "gall" + "bladder." "Gall" comes from Old English "gealla," meaning bile, and is related to a family of words across Germanic languages tied to a yellow-green color — the same root that likely colors "yellow" and "gold." The bitter bile gave us the figurative "gall" for bitterness and nerve. "Bladder" is also Old English ("blædre"), originally any inflatable sac, related to "blow." So literally: the bag that holds your bitter yellow stuff.
- storage size
- Holds about 50 milliliters of concentrated bile
- removable
- Liver works fine without it
- stone factory
- Can grow gallstones the size of golf balls
- name origin
- Gall once meant bitterness and bad temper
- squeeze trigger
- Fatty meals make it contract and dump bile