Scrub

How to spell scrub

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scrub

What does scrub mean?

1. verbTo clean something by rubbing it hard, usually with a brush, water, and effort.
2. nounLow, stunted trees and bushes, or the rough land covered by them.
3. verbTo cancel or abandon a planned event or operation.

Scrub in a sentence

• verb

  She had to scrub the burnt pan for several minutes.

• noun

  The trail wound through dense scrub for several kilometres.

• verb

  Mission control had to scrub the launch because of high winds.

• verb

  The cleaners scrub the kitchen floor every evening before locking up.

• noun

  Kangaroos sheltered in the dry scrub during the heat of the day.

• verb

  They decided to scrub the weekend trip when the forecast turned bad.

Where does scrub come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Scrub traces back to a Germanic root and probably reached English partly from a Middle Dutch or Middle Low German word like schrobben, meaning to scrape or rub hard, and partly as a variant of the older English shrub. The cleaning sense, recorded from the late 1300s onward, kept the idea of vigorous rubbing to remove dirt. The vegetation sense, meaning stunted bushes or rough scrubland, developed as a dialect variant of shrub, since both described low, scrubby growth. From that came the figurative use for something undersized or inferior, which is why a worthless player or person was once called a scrub. The more recent meaning to cancel or call off, popularised by aviation and space programmes in the twentieth century, borrows the cleaning image of wiping a plan away. The single, blunt spelling, with its tight consonant cluster scr- and final -b, mirrors the abrupt, scratchy action the word describes.

How the word is built

• scrub (single Germanic root meaning a low brush or to rub hard); no prefix or suffix