gorge [ME] The Old French word gorge meant ‘throat’ and was adopted into English with the same meaning, hence to gorge yourself is to shovel food down your throat. It came to mean ‘the contents of the stomach’, and when we talk about someone’s gorge rising in disgust it is in this sense. A gorge is also a narrow valley between hills, a sense that emerged in the middle of the 18th century from the idea of this geographical feature being narrow like a throat.