גִּהֵק

The word "גִּהֵק" (gihek) is first documented in the Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Berakhot (24a-b) in a quote from Rabbi Hanina bar Hama: "I saw Rabbi [Judah HaNasi] belch and yawn and spit... during his prayer." The meaning of the word wasn't clear to medieval rabbis. Some believed it referred to stretching, as a compound of "gav hekim" (raising the body). However, Rashi, like Nathan of Rome in his dictionary "HaArukh," determined that it referred to the noisy action made after eating. Rashi defined gihek as: "Sometimes a person brings out from his body to his mouth air from his fullness, and its smell is like the smell of the food he ate." Rashi's interpretation was adopted in Modern Hebrew, and the word appears with this meaning as early as the early Haskalah literature, for example, in "Refuat Ha'am" by Mendel Lefin from 1789. This action has an additional popular name: גְּרֶפְּס (greps, from Yiddish "greptz"), which is common in everyday speech.