Climb

How to spell climb

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce climb

What does climb mean?

1. verbTo move upward or over something, especially using the hands and feet or by steady effort.
2. nounAn act of ascending, or a route or stretch that must be ascended.

Climb in a sentence

• verb

  The hikers paused to climb the steep ridge before lunch.

• noun

  The final climb to the summit took nearly two hours.

• verb

  Engineers had to climb the tower to inspect the wiring.

• noun

  That last hill is a punishing climb for cyclists.

Where does climb come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Climb descends from the Old English verb climban, which meant to mount or ascend by clinging and gripping. That verb belonged to a wider Germanic family and was closely related to the idea of clinging fast, sharing roots with words like clamber and even cleave (in the sense of sticking to something). In the earliest English the word kept a fully pronounced b, since climban ended in a b sound, but over the centuries the final b stopped being voiced while the spelling stubbornly kept it. That frozen, silent b is the whole spelling trap: the ear hears no trace of it, yet the letter survives from the word's thousand-year-old form. The same silent-b pattern shows up in close relatives such as limb and thumb, all of them carrying letters that the modern tongue no longer pronounces.

How the word is built

• climb (whole word from Old English climban: to ascend); the silent -b is a remnant of the original consonant cluster