Numb means unable to feel anything in a part of the body. Numb fingers, my foot has gone numb, numb with cold.
The b is silent. It happens from cold, from pressure on a nerve — a leg gone to sleep — and from anaesthetic. Emotionally, numb means unable to feel anything at all, which is a common description of shock and grief: numb with shock, went numb. As a verb, to numb is to take feeling away: numb the pain. Note numbness, and that numb is not the same as paralysed, which is about movement.
1adjectivenumbUnable to feel anything in a body part.
“His fingers were numb within about ten minutes.”
2adjectiveemotionUnable to feel emotion.
“She was numb for about a fortnight and then it hit.”
numb is a loss of feeling.
The old one behind it means taken. A numb hand is one the cold has taken from you.
hooks ontotake
Numb comes from an old past participle of the verb nim, meaning to take — so numb literally means taken, in the sense of seized or deprived. The b was added by writers on the model of dumb and thumb and has never been pronounced.
Proto-Indo-European
*nem-
English, today
numb
Built from
From the past participle of nim (“to take”). Compare German benommen (“dazed, numb”) and Old Norse numinn. The final ⟨b⟩ is a later addition; it was never pronounced, and did not appear in the original word.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA