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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

stub.

Something blunted, stunted, or cut short, such as stubble or a stump.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/stʌb//stʊb/Ireland, Northern-England
  1. Something blunted, stunted, or cut short, such as stubble or a stump.

  2. A piece of certain paper items, designed to be torn off and kept for record or identification purposes.

    check stub
    ticket stub
  3. A placeholder procedure that has the signature of the planned procedure but does not yet implement the intended behavior.

  4. A procedure that translates requests from external systems into a format suitable for processing and then submits those requests for processing.

  5. A row heading in a table (with horizontal reference, whereas a column heading has vertical reference).

  6. An article providing only minimal information and intended for later development.

  7. A length of transmission line or waveguide that is connected at one end only.

  8. The remaining part of the docked tail of a dog

  9. An unequal first or last interest calculation period, as a part of a financial swap contract

  10. A log or block of wood.

    obsolete
  11. A blockhead.

    obsolete
  12. A pen with a short, blunt nib.

  13. An old and worn horseshoe nail.

  14. Stub iron.

  15. The smallest remainder of a smoked cigarette; a butt.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English stubbe (“tree stump”), from Old English stybb, stubb (“tree stump”), from Proto-West Germanic *stubb, from Proto-Germanic *stubbaz (compare Middle Dutch stubbe, Old Norse stubbr, Faroese stubbi (“stub”)), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)tew-; compare steep (“sharp slope”). Doublet of stob. Sense extended in Middle English to similarly shaped objects. Verb sense “strike one’s toe” is recorded 1848; “extinguish a cigarette” 1927.

verb/stʌb//stʊb/Ireland, Northern-England
  1. To remove most of a tree, bush, or other rooted plant by cutting it close to the ground.

    transitive
  2. To remove a plant by pulling it out by the roots.

    transitive
  3. To jam, hit, or bump, especially a toe.

    transitive
    I stubbed my toe trying to find the light switch in the dark.
Where this word comes from

From Middle English stubbe (“tree stump”), from Old English stybb, stubb (“tree stump”), from Proto-West Germanic *stubb, from Proto-Germanic *stubbaz (compare Middle Dutch stubbe, Old Norse stubbr, Faroese stubbi (“stub”)), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)tew-; compare steep (“sharp slope”). Doublet of stob. Sense extended in Middle English to similarly shaped objects. Verb sense “strike one’s toe” is recorded 1848; “extinguish a cigarette” 1927.

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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.