Other forms: tubs
A tub is a wide open container, usually round and not very deep. A tub of ice cream, a plastic tub, a tub of paint.
In food shops it is a standard unit — a tub of margarine, a tub of yoghurt — and it names the container rather than a fixed amount. It also means a large open vessel for washing or soaking, and in American English a bathtub is usually shortened to tub: get in the tub. A hot tub is the heated outdoor kind. Note tubby, meaning slightly fat, which is affectionate and not entirely polite.
1nountubA wide open container, often round.
“There is a tub of paint under the stairs.”
2nounbathA bath.
“He was in the tub when the phone rang.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
tub is a container.
Middle Dutch tubbe came into English through trade, like much of the vocabulary of barrels and containers. Its ancestors beyond Dutch are unknown, which is common for the plain names of everyday objects.
Middle Low German
tubbe
Middle Dutch
tubbe
Middle English
tubbe
English, today
tub
From Middle English tubbe, tobbe, from Middle Dutch tubbe or Middle Low German tubbe, tobbe, further etymology unknown. Considered to be unrelated to tube.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA