Sub

How to spell sub

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sub

What does sub mean?

1. nounA person who takes the place of another, especially a replacement player in a sport or a temporary teacher.
2. nounA naval vessel designed to operate underwater.
3. nounA long sandwich made in a split roll, filled with meat, cheese, and salad.
4. nounAn informal short form of subscription, a recurring paid membership for a service.

Sub in a sentence

• The manager brought on a fresh sub in the second half.

• The nuclear sub stayed submerged for three months.

• He ordered a foot-long sub with extra cheese for lunch.

• She cancelled her streaming sub to save money each month.

• A sub covered the maths class while the regular teacher was ill.

• Sonar detected an enemy sub off the coast.

Where does sub come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Sub is a clipping, that is a shortened form, of several longer words that all begin with the Latin element sub, meaning 'under' or 'below'. Depending on context it stands in for substitute, submarine, subscription, subordinate, or the sandwich known as a submarine. The underlying Latin sub gave English a huge family of words where something sits beneath, follows, or stands in place of another, such as subway, submerge, and subtract. The submarine sense is the most literal, naming a vessel that travels under the surface of the sea. The substitute sense developed because a substitute is, in a sense, a 'second-string' player who comes under or behind the first choice, while the sandwich sense is simply named after its long, submarine-like shape. As a short, blunt monosyllable, sub became popular in twentieth-century casual speech for exactly the brevity its clipped form provides.

How the word is built

• sub (clipped form of various words beginning with the prefix sub-, from Latin sub 'under, below')