Stubby means short and thick. Stubby fingers, a stubby pencil, stubby and round.
It is affectionate more often than not, and it describes proportion rather than size — something stubby is short for its width. In Australia a stubby is a small beer bottle. Note stub, meaning a short remaining piece, as in a ticket stub.
1adjectivestubbyShort and thick.
“The puppy had short, stubby legs and a long body.”
synonyms: squat, chunky
stubby is a quality of shape.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)tew-
Proto-Germanic
*stubbaz
Proto-West Germanic
*stubb
Old English
stybb
Middle English
stubbe — tree stump
English
stub
English, today
stubby
Built from
From stub + -y. stub comes 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