Dub

How to spell dub

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dub

What does dub mean?

1. verbTo give someone or something an informal name, title, or nickname.
2. verbTo add or replace the soundtrack of a film or to copy a recording onto another medium.
3. verbTo make someone a knight by a ceremonial tap on the shoulder with a sword.

Dub in a sentence

• The press began to dub her the queen of daytime television.

• The studio paid actors to dub the cartoon into Spanish.

• The monarch would dub each kneeling soldier with the flat of the blade.

• Critics dub the new tower the ugliest building in the city.

• Engineers had to dub fresh dialogue over the noisy original take.

• Tradition allowed the king to dub a worthy commoner on the battlefield.

Where does dub come from?

Language of origin: French

The oldest strand of 'dub' is the verb meaning to make someone a knight by a ceremonial tap of the sword, recorded in Old English as 'dubbian' around the eleventh century. That form almost certainly came from the Old French 'adober' or 'adouber', meaning to equip or arm a young man with armour, which is why the act of dubbing was originally about kitting out a fighter rather than merely touching his shoulder. From the idea of formally conferring a title, the word broadened into the everyday sense of giving someone a name or nickname. A separate and much later meaning, to add or replace a soundtrack on film or to copy a recording, arose in the twentieth century as a clipped form of 'double', from Latin 'duplus' meaning twofold, reflecting the idea of laying one sound over another. The Jamaican music style called 'dub' takes its name from this studio sense of re-recording and remixing existing tracks.

How the word is built

• single root, no prefix or suffix (one syllable; in the recording sense a clipped form of 'double')