Rubber

How to spell rubber

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rubber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rubber mean?

1. nounA tough elastic substance made from the latex of tropical plants or produced synthetically.
2. nounA small piece of rubber or similar material used to remove pencil marks.
3. nounA decisive set or series of games in whist, bridge, or similar.

Rubber in a sentence

• The tyres are made of hard-wearing rubber.

• He rubbed out the wrong answer with a soft rubber.

• They played a long rubber of bridge after dinner.

• She pulled on a pair of rubber gloves before cleaning the oven.

• Every pencil case held a sharpener and a rubber.

• Winning the final hand secured the rubber for her partnership.

Where does rubber come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Rubber comes straight from the English verb 'to rub', which appears in Middle English around the 1300s and is probably of Low German or Dutch origin, related to words meaning 'to scrape' or 'to scour'. The noun 'rubber' simply meant 'a thing that rubs', and one of its first practical uses was for a small piece of material used to rub out pencil marks. When explorers brought back the elastic gum of South American trees, the chemist Joseph Priestley noted in 1770 that the substance was excellent for rubbing away graphite, so the eraser sense transferred to the material itself, and the name 'rubber' stuck for the gum. The spelling keeps the doubled 'b' because a single consonant after a short stressed vowel is doubled before the suffix, the same pattern seen in 'runner' and 'dinner'. The unrelated card-game sense, a decisive set of games in whist and bridge, is older and of uncertain origin, possibly from bowls.

How the word is built

• rub (to rub, scrub)
• -er (agent/instrument noun suffix)