Other forms: rubbers
Rubber is the stretchy, bouncy material that tyres, wellington boots and washing-up gloves are made of. Press your thumb into it and it pushes straight back out.
It starts in a tree — white sap tapped from a rubber tree into a cup strapped to the trunk — though most rubber now comes out of a factory. In British English a rubber is the small block you rub pencil out with; American English calls that an eraser and calls a rubber something else entirely, so can I borrow your rubber lands badly in the wrong country. The word builds compounds all over the place: rubber band, rubber gloves, rubber bullet, rubber stamp. To rubber-stamp a decision is to approve it without properly looking. In bridge and in cricket, a rubber is a series of games played between the same two sides.
1nounrubberA stretchy, bouncy material made from the sap of a tropical tree or produced industrially.~96%
“The soles are thick rubber and grip well on wet rock.”
2nounsmallA small block for rubbing out pencil marks, in British use.~2%
“Can I borrow your rubber? I have written the date wrong.”
3nounseriesA series of games played between the same two sides.~2%
“They took the rubber three games to one.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
rubber is a material.
Rubber is rub plus -er: the thing that rubs. It was named for what it did to pencil marks, and the name then spread from the eraser to the whole substance, pushing aside the older name, caoutchouc. So the tyres on a lorry are called rubber because of a schoolroom eraser.
Proto-Germanic
*rubbōną
Middle English
rubben
English
rub
English, today
rubber
Built from
From rub + er. The sense of the substance comes from its ability to function as an eraser, displacing earlier caoutchouc. The senses not pertaining to rubbing or erasing are secondarily derived from the name of the substance. rub Middle English rubben, of unknown origin; possibly ultimately from Proto-Germanic rubbōną, related to reufaną (“to tear”). Cognate with stq rubje (“to rub, scrape”), German Low German rubben (“to rub”), Low German rubblig (“rough, uneven”), Dutch robben, rubben (“to rub smooth; scrape; scrub”), Danish rubbe (“to rub, scrub”), Icelandic - and Norwegian - rubba (“to scrape”). More at reave.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA