Other forms: cubs
A cub is the young of a bear, lion, fox or similar animal. A lion cub, a fox cub, the cubs stayed in the den.
It covers the large carnivores and the fox; a young dog is a puppy and a young cat a kitten. Cub Scouts are the junior section of the Scouts, aged about eight to ten. A cub reporter is a trainee journalist, which is chiefly American. Note that fox cubs are born blind and stay underground for roughly four weeks, which is why they are almost never seen in spring.
1nouncubThe young of a bear, lion or fox.
“The lion cubs played in the grass while their mother watched.”
cub is a young animal.
The word appeared in the sixteenth century and its origin is uncertain, possibly Irish. It is one of the surprisingly many common English animal words with no traceable ancestry at all.
Proto-Indo-European
*gup- — round object, knoll
Proto-Germanic
*kubb-
English, today
cub
Built from
From earlier cubbe. Origin unknown. According to Pokorny, from Proto-Germanic kubb-, from Proto-Indo-European gup- (“round object, knoll”), from gew- (“to bend, curve, convex, arch, vault”). Related terms include cup (cf. cupboard), coffin, cove, etc, essentially “chamber”, thus cub maybe initially derived from the sense “den”, or maybe “womb”. A probable cognate is also found in gmq -: dialectal Swedish kubbe, kybbe, köbbe, kibb, Danish kippe (“calf”). Also compare Icelandic and Old Norse kobbi (“seal”), Old Irish cuib (“whelp”). Compare also English cob. Originally, the meaning was specifically "young fox", in which sense it has largely replaced whelp.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA