Stub

How to spell stub

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stub

What does stub mean?

1. nounThe short part that remains after the main piece has been used, torn off, or worn down.
2. verbTo strike one's toe or foot painfully against a hard object, or to extinguish something by pressing it down.

Stub in a sentence

• noun

  She kept the ticket stub as proof of purchase for the refund.

• verb

  Be careful not to stub your toe on the loose paving slab.

• noun

  The pencil had worn down to a tiny stub that barely reached his fingers.

• verb

  He paused to stub out his cigarette before entering the office.

Where does stub come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English stybb or stubb, which named the short, stout piece of a tree left standing in the ground after the trunk had been felled. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic words for stumps and blunt remnants, with close relatives in Old Norse and Dutch, all carrying the sense of something broken off short and left behind. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from tree stumps to any stunted or remaining fragment, which is how we arrived at the pencil stub, the cigarette stub, and the torn-off ticket stub. The verb sense of striking your toe against a hard object grew naturally from the idea of hitting something short and blunt, and it became common in the nineteenth century. The spelling has stayed mercifully simple: a single short vowel between two clear consonant clusters, with no silent letters to trip up the writer.

How the word is built

• stub (single root, from Old English stybb meaning tree stump; no prefix or suffix)