Other forms: stubs, stubbing, stubbed
A stub is the short piece left when the rest is used up. A ticket stub, a pencil stub, cheque stub.
It is what remains after the useful part has gone, and it often serves as a record — a ticket stub proves you were there, and a cheque stub records what you wrote. As a verb, to stub your toe is to strike it against something, and to stub out a cigarette is to press it until it goes out. In an encyclopedia, a stub is an article too short to be much use.
1nounstubThe short piece left when the rest is used up.
“She wrote with the stub of a pencil that was barely longer than her thumb.”
2verbstrikeTo strike a toe, or to press out a cigarette.
“I stubbed my toe on the bed in the dark.”
stub is a remaining piece.
Old English stybb meant a tree stump, and every sense follows from that — the short remaining part after the rest is gone.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)tew-
Proto-Germanic
*stubbaz
Proto-West Germanic
*stubb
Old English
stybb
Middle English
stubbe — tree stump
English, today
stub
Built from
From Middle English stubbe (“tree stump”), from Old English stybb, stubb (“tree stump”), from Proto-West Germanic stubb, from Proto-Germanic stubbaz (compare Middle Dutch stubbe, Old Norse stubbr, Faroese stubbi (“stub”)), from Proto-Indo-European (s)tew-; compare steep (“sharp slope”). a doublet of stob. Sense extended in Middle English to similarly shaped objects. Verb sense “strike one’s toe” is recorded 1848; “extinguish a cigarette” 1927.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA