Mob

How to spell mob

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mob

What does mob mean?

1. nounA large, disorderly crowd of people, or an organised criminal gang.
2. verbTo crowd around someone or something in large numbers.

Mob in a sentence

• noun

  An angry mob gathered outside the courthouse.

• verb

  Fans tend to mob the singer whenever she leaves the hotel.

• noun

  The detective spent years investigating the mob that ran the docks.

• verb

  Shoppers will mob the entrance the moment the sale begins.

Where does mob come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Mob is a clipped form of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus, which literally meant 'the movable common people' or 'the fickle crowd', built on mobilis 'easily moved' and vulgus 'the common people'. In the late seventeenth century, fashionable English speakers shortened this borrowed phrase to mobile and then trimmed it further to the snappy single syllable mob, a fashion for slang abbreviation that some careful writers of the day complained about loudly. The sense kept its disapproving edge: a mob was an unruly, disorderly throng rather than an orderly gathering. Over time it broadened to cover any large crowd and later, especially in American usage, an organised criminal gang. The same mobilis root that gave us mob also sits inside the everyday words mobile and mobility, all of them tracing back to the idea of movement.

How the word is built

• mob (clipped from Latin mobile vulgus: the fickle crowd)