Cub

How to spell cub

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cub

What does cub mean?

1. nounThe young of certain wild mammals, such as a bear, lion, fox, or wolf.
2. nounAn inexperienced beginner, especially a young newspaper reporter learning the job.

Cub in a sentence

• The lioness carried her cub gently across the grass.

• As a cub reporter, she spent months covering local council meetings.

• Visitors at the zoo watched a bear cub tumble down the slope.

• The editor assigned the smallest stories to the newest cub on the desk.

Where does cub come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origins of cub are genuinely obscure, which is unusual for such a short, everyday English word. It first appears in writing in the sixteenth century, used for the young of a fox or bear, and earlier forms include 'cubbe'. Some scholars suspect a link to an Old Irish or Gaelic word for a young animal or whelp, while others connect it loosely to Old Norse 'kobbi', a term of endearment, but neither line is firmly proven. Because no clean parent word has been traced, dictionaries usually mark it as of uncertain origin. The spelling itself has stayed simple and phonetic, which makes it one of the easier members of the animal-young vocabulary to write.

How the word is built

• cub (single root; no prefix or suffix)