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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

glob.

A round, shapeless or amorphous lump, as of a semisolid substance.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɡlɑb/US/ɡlɒb/UK
  1. A round, shapeless or amorphous lump, as of a semisolid substance.

    He put a glob of paint into the cup and went on painting.
  2. A millimeter-sized colour module found beyond the visual area V2 in the brain's parvocellular pathway.

Where this word comes from

Possibly a blend of blob + gob, or a clipping of globule. An element of sound symbolism is clearly involved: compare such phonetically and semantically similar words as glop, gop, lob, blob, lump, clump and clod. (Still, globe, clump and clod may be related via the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-; compare clew.) In the biological sense, proposed by Bevil R. Conway and Doris Y. Tsao, by analogy with the cytochrome-oxidase "blobs" of V1, an earlier stage in the hierarchical elaboration of colour.

verb/ɡlɑb/US/ɡlɒb/UK
  1. To stick in globs or lumps.

Where this word comes from

Possibly a blend of blob + gob, or a clipping of globule. An element of sound symbolism is clearly involved: compare such phonetically and semantically similar words as glop, gop, lob, blob, lump, clump and clod. (Still, globe, clump and clod may be related via the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-; compare clew.) In the biological sense, proposed by Bevil R. Conway and Doris Y. Tsao, by analogy with the cytochrome-oxidase "blobs" of V1, an earlier stage in the hierarchical elaboration of colour.

noun/ɡlɑb/US/ɡlɒb/UK
  1. A limited pattern matching technique using wildcards, less powerful than a regular expression; such a pattern.

Where this word comes from

Originates from the early (c. 1970) Unix command glob; clipping of global.

verb/ɡlɑb/US/ɡlɒb/UK
  1. To carry out pattern matching using a glob.

Where this word comes from

Originates from the early (c. 1970) Unix command glob; clipping of global.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.