stub

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. Something blunted, stunted, or cut short, such as stubble or a stump.
  2. A piece of certain paper items, designed to be torn off and kept for record or identification purposes.
  3. A placeholder procedure that has the signature of the planned procedure but does not yet implement the intended behavior.
  4. A procedure that translates requests from external systems into a format suitable for processing and then submits those requests for processing.
  5. A row heading in a table (with horizontal reference, whereas a column heading has vertical reference).
  6. An article providing only minimal information and intended for later development.
  7. A length of transmission line or waveguide that is connected at one end only.
  8. The remaining part of the docked tail of a dog
  9. An unequal first or last interest calculation period, as a part of a financial swap contract
  10. A log or block of wood.
  11. A blockhead.
  12. A pen with a short, blunt nib.
verb
  1. To remove most of a tree, bush, or other rooted plant by cutting it close to the ground.
  2. To remove a plant by pulling it out by the roots.
  3. To jam, hit, or bump, especially a toe.

Pronunciation

stŭb /stʌb/ en-us-stub.ogg /stʊb/

Word forms

stub stubs stubbing stubbed

Etymology

From Middle English stubbe (“tree stump”), from Old English stybb, stubb (“tree stump”), from Proto-West Germanic *stubb, from Proto-Germanic *stubbaz (compare Middle Dutch stubbe, Old Norse stubbr, Faroese stubbi (“stub”)), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)tew-; compare steep (“sharp slope”). Doublet of stob. Sense extended in Middle English to similarly shaped objects. Verb sense “strike one’s toe” is recorded 1848; “extinguish a cigarette” 1927.

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.