Limb

How to spell limb

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce limb

What does limb mean?

1. nounAn arm or a leg of a person or animal.
2. nounA large branch of a tree.

Limb in a sentence

• The surgeon worked carefully to save the injured limb.

• A heavy limb fell from the oak during the storm.

• After the long flight she stretched every aching limb.

• The cat clung to a high limb until the firefighters arrived.

Where does limb come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from the Old English lim, which meant a limb of the body or a branch of a tree, the very same two meanings it carries today. It traces back to a Germanic root shared with the Old Norse limr, and originally there was no 'b' at all; the spelling was simply 'lim'. The silent 'b' crept in during the late medieval and early modern period, partly by analogy with genuinely b-ending words such as 'climb', 'thumb', and 'dumb', where scribes liked to round off a final 'm' with a 'b'. That added letter never reflected any sound, which is exactly why the modern spelling is a trap: the ear hears nothing after the 'm'. The sense of an arm or leg came first in English, with the tree-branch meaning developing as a natural extension of the same idea of a projecting part.

How the word is built

• limb (whole word, from Old English lim 'limb, branch'); the silent -b was added later by analogy with words like 'thumb' and 'crumb'