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numbing

adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,922 of 15,258neutral

Numbing means taking away feeling from what it touches. A numbing cream, numbing cold, numbing pain.

A local anaesthetic blocks the nerve signal rather than the pain itself, which is why the area feels absent instead of comfortable. Figuratively, numbing means dulling the mind — mind-numbing tedium. Note numb, whose b is silent and was never pronounced in the modern word.

Definitions of numbing

  1. 1adjectivenumbingTaking away feeling from what it touches.B2+

    “The dentist rubbed a numbing gel on my gum before the injection.”

numbing is a quality of deadening.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *nem-

  2. English

    numb

  3. English, today

    numbing

Built from

  • nim · English — to take

numb comes 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

Practised in Texture & Touch

Practise this word

numbing in the wild

  • Or lam is a mildly spicy, slightly tongue numbing, Laotian stew originating from Luang Prabang, Laos.

    Or lam

  • True to its Sichuan roots, the desired taste should be both spicy and mouth-numbing.

    Fuqi feipian

  • When eaten, Sichuan pepper produces a tingling, numbing effect due to the presence of hydroxy-alpha sanshool.

    Sichuan pepper

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.