Bob

How to spell bob

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bob

What does bob mean?

1. verbTo move quickly up and down, especially on or in water.
2. nounA short hairstyle cut to roughly jaw length and the same length all round.

Bob in a sentence

• verb

  The small boats bob gently on the harbour swell.

• noun

  She asked the stylist for a sleek bob that ended at the chin.

• verb

  Corks bob on the surface whenever a fish takes the bait.

• noun

  A classic bob suits her round face better than long layers.

Where does bob come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bob is one of those plain little English words whose deep origins are genuinely murky, which is why its confidence here is modest. It appears in Middle English around the 1300s, first as a verb meaning to move with a short, jerking motion, and as a noun for a hanging cluster or knob, such as a bunch of fruit or a weight at the end of a line. The sound itself may be partly imitative, echoing the abrupt up-and-down motion it describes. Over the centuries the noun branched into many practical senses: the weight on a plumb line or pendulum, a short docked tail (as in 'bobtail'), and from the late 1800s a short, blunt-cut hairstyle, the hair having been 'bobbed' or cut short. The British slang use meaning a shilling, recorded from the 1780s, is of unknown origin and unrelated in any clear way to the motion sense. Because the word is so short and so old, its single doubled-free spelling rarely causes trouble.

How the word is built

• bob (a single root word; in the haircut sense possibly from the name Bob/bobbed)