Etymology: Middle English bali , bely < Old English bælig, bęlig, earlier bælg, bęlg ‘bag, skin, envelope, hull (of beans and peas),’ identical with Old Norse belgr ‘skin, bag,’ Old High German balg , Middle Dutch balch , Gothic balgs ‘bag, sack’ < Germanic *balgi-z ‘bag,’ lit. ‘inflated or swollen thing,’ < belgan , past tense balg , ‘to be inflated, swell up.’ The same word of which the plural appears as bellows n. The sense ‘belly’ did not exist in Old English, and has not been developed in the cognate languages. Evidence is wanting to show whether it came directly from the sense of a material ‘bag,’ or whether the meaning ‘body’ (as the shell or husk of the soul) intervened: compare senses 2, 3 The history of the differentiation of belly and bellows is complicated. The various dialectal forms of the Old English word were West Saxon bięlg, later bylg, bylig, Kentish and East Saxon bęlg, bęlig, Anglian bælg, bælig; these gave the early Middle English buli (ü), beli, bali, respectively. Of these beli, bely occurs in sense both of ‘bellows’ and ‘belly’; bali only as = ‘belly’; buli(es) only as = ‘bellows.’ Hence it may be inferred that the sense ‘body, belly’ arose first in dialect where the form was bali, baly, and that this form passed with this sense into other dialects, which could thus discriminate bali ‘belly,’ < beli, buli, ‘bellows.’ Meanwhile the northern dialect obtained the distinction in another way, viz. by the establishment of belw in sense of ‘bellows’: thus the Promp. Parv. has Bely venter, Below follis. Finally the plural belwes, belowes was generally adopted in that sense, and beli, bely became the literary form for the part of the body. Bally still occurs dialectally, e.g. in Lancashire and Shropshire.

Etymology: < belly n.