Meaning: belly

Illustrative Context

He punched him in the belly.

Target Sense

The front part of the human body below the rib-cage/chest and above the pelvis.

• Avoid more loaded terms with specific overtones, such as size or protrusion, e.g. paunch, pot belly.
• Avoid higher register terms, e.g. scientific or medical terms such as abdomen.
• Avoid nursery-register terms such as tummy.
• Avoid terms specific to internal organs. Only in cases where a lexeme that originally referred to an internal organ has since extended semantically to become the default register word also (ambiguously) for the target sense here, would that lexeme be the correct selection. An example is that in some varieties of English, stomach has indeed now become the (ambiguous) default term for this meaning.