Crying loudly and heavily, usually with tears and big sobs.
From Middle English 'baul,' possibly from Old Norse. The word originally meant to cry out loudly, and evolved specifically to mean loud crying with visible distress.
Babies bawl instinctively because loud crying is their most effective survival tool—it communicates distress to adults better than quiet crying, which is why newborn screams are so hard to ignore.
Crying/weeping has been linguistically feminized ('boys don't cry'), associating emotional vocal expression with weakness and femaleness. 'Bawling' carries residual associations with uncontrolled emotion coded as female.
Use descriptively for any person's loud crying; avoid pairing disproportionately with women or using to mock emotional expression.
["sobbing","crying loudly","weeping"]
Emotional expression is human across genders; gendering tears as feminine weakness has been weaponized to silence both men and women.
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