Other forms: grubs
A grub is the soft legless larva of an insect. A fat grub, grubs in the soil, birds after grubs.
It is the beetle and fly stage between egg and pupa, and grubs in a lawn are usually chafer or leatherjacket larvae eating the roots. As a verb, to grub about is to dig or search roughly: grubbing about in a drawer. Informally, grub is food — pub grub, get some grub — which is friendly and slightly dated. Note grubby, meaning dirty; and grub up, meaning to dig out by the roots.
1noungrubThe soft legless larva of an insect.
“The blackbird pulled a fat white grub out of the soil.”
2nounfoodFood, informally.
“Come on, I'm starving; let's go and get some grub.”
grub is a larva, or food.
The verb came first: Old English grubbian meant to dig. The larva is named for what it does in the soil, and grubby and grub meaning food both descend from the same digging.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰrebʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*grubb-
Proto-West Germanic
*grubb-
Old English
*grubbian
Middle English
grubben
English, today
grub
From Middle English grubben, grobben, from Old English grubbian, from Proto-West Germanic grubb-, from Proto-Germanic grubb- (compare Middle Dutch grobben (“to scrape, scramble, grab”), Old High German grubilōn (“to dig, search”), German grübeln (“to meditate, ponder”)), from Proto-Germanic grub- (“to dig”) (see grabaną). The noun sense of "larva" is from Middle English grub, grubbe, grobbe, crubbe and may derive from the notion of "digging insect" from the verb above, or from the uncertainly related Middle English grub (“dwarfish fellow”). Compare West Frisian krobbe (“beetle”). The slang sense of "food" is first recorded 1659, and has been linked with birds eating grubs or with bub (“drink”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA