Other forms: combs, combing, combed
A comb is a flat piece of plastic or wood with a row of teeth along one edge, and to comb is to draw it through your hair. Wet hair after a shower, a parting pulled straight, the comb your grandfather kept in his top pocket.
The B is silent: it rhymes with home. Comb also means to search a place inch by inch — police combed the woods — and you comb through records or files, where that sense takes THROUGH. A cockerel's comb is the red crest on top of his head, and a honeycomb is the wax grid the bees build. You comb hair and you brush a coat, a floor or your teeth; combing is for things with strands. Comb out means to work a knot loose, and a comb-over is hair dragged sideways across a bald patch.
1verbcombTo draw a comb through hair to tidy or straighten it.~16%
“He combed his hair flat before the interview.”
2verbscourTo search a place or a set of records thoroughly, going over every part of it.~2%
“Detectives combed the beach for the missing shoe.”
synonyms: scour, search
3nountoothedA flat toothed tool for tidying hair.~80%
“There was a broken comb at the bottom of the drawer.”
4nounredThe red fleshy crest on top of a cockerel's head.~2%
“The rooster's comb flopped over to one side.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
comb is a grooming tool.
Old English camb, from Proto-Germanic *kambaz, goes back to Proto-Indo-European *ǵómbʰos — 'tooth'. So the word is not named after hair at all: a comb is a row of teeth, and the same root turns up in the Greek word for a molar and in Sanskrit jambha. German Kamm and Dutch kam are the same word still, and the English verb was made from the noun, driving out an older verb, kemb.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵómbʰos — tooth
Proto-Germanic
*kambaz — comb
Proto-West Germanic
*kamb
Old English
camb — comb
Middle English
comb
English, today
comb
From Middle English comb, from Old English camb (“comb”), from Proto-West Germanic kamb, from Proto-Germanic kambaz (“comb”), from Proto-Indo-European ǵómbʰos (“tooth”), a a doublet of cam. The verb is derived from the noun and displaced the older verb kemb. 2 Compare stq Koum, Swedish/Dutch kam, Danish kam, Norwegian kam, German Kamm; also txb keme, Lithuanian žam̃bas (“sharp edge”), cu зѫбъ, Albanian dhëmb, Ancient Greek γομφίος (“backtooth, molar”), Sanskrit जम्भ).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA