Chubby means softly round in a way that looks healthy rather than heavy. A baby's cheeks, the crease at a toddler's wrist, a chubby puppy that hasn't grown into its paws.
The word is warm about children and animals and risky about adults — call a grown man chubby to his face and it lands as an insult, however kindly you mean it. It fastens onto body parts as readily as whole people: chubby fingers, chubby knees, chubby little arms. Plump does the same job with more dignity; tubby and podgy are ruder. Chubby belongs to talk, not to paperwork — a doctor's notes say overweight. The noun is chubbiness, and chubby-cheeked is the standard way to describe a round face.
1adjectivechubbyPleasantly round and soft-bodied, said of a child, an animal or a part of the body.
“The baby waved a chubby hand at the camera.”
synonyms: plump, podgy
Also accepted in games: plump
Chubby has been in English since 1611, and it comes from a fish. The chub is a short, thick, blunt-bodied fish used as bait, and its name traces back through Middle English to Old Norse kubbr, 'block, stump, log'. Add -y and you have chubby: shaped like a chub, which is to say shaped like a little log. Dialect Swedish still has kubbug for the same idea.
Old Norse
kubbr
Middle English
*cubbe
English, today
chubby
Built from
Recorded since 1611, from chub (“short, thick fish species used as bait"; used metaphorically since 1558 for "lazy person”), an assibilated form of cub (“a lump, heap, mass”) and cob, from Middle English cubbe (found only in derivative cubbel (“a block to which an animal is tethered”)), from Old Norse kubbr, kumbr (“block, stump, log”) and/or Old Norse kumben (“stumpy”), equivalent to chub + y. Cognate with dialectal Swedish kubbug (“fat, plump, chubby”). More at chub.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Everyday Adjectives, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 34 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word