comb
Pronunciation: /kəʊm/
The English word “comb” has 20 meanings listed here.
noun
- A toothed implement for grooming the hair or (formerly) for keeping it in place.
- A machine used in separating choice cotton fibers from worsted cloth fibers.
- The toothed plate at the top and bottom of an escalator that prevents objects getting trapped between the moving stairs and fixed landings.
- A toothed tool used for chasing screws on work in a lathe; a chaser.
- The notched scale of a wire micrometer.
- The collector of an electrical machine, usually resembling a comb.
- A toothed plate used for creating wells in agar gels for electrophoresis.
- A toothed wooden pick used to push the weft thread tightly against the previous pass of thread to create a tight weave.
- One of a pair of peculiar organs on the base of the abdomen in scorpions, with which they comb substrate.
- A ctene.
- A fleshy growth on the top of the head of some birds and reptiles; crest.
- A crest (of metal, leather, etc) on a piece of armor, especially on a helmet.
- The top part of a gun’s stock.
- A structure of hexagon cells made by bees for storing honey; honeycomb.
- The main body of a harmonica containing the air chambers and to which the reed plates are attached.
- A former, commonly cone-shaped, used in hat manufacturing for hardening soft fibre.
- An old English measure of corn equal to the half quarter.
- The curling crest of a wave; a comber.
- A connected and reduced curve with irreducible components consisting of a smooth subcurve (called the handle) and one or more additional irreducible components (called teeth) that each intersect the handle in a single point that is unequal to the unique point of intersection for any of the other teeth.
- A kind of vertical plate in a lode.
Etymology
From Middle English comb, from Old English camb (“comb”), from Proto-West Germanic *kamb, from Proto-Germanic *kambaz (“comb”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵómbʰos (“tooth”), a doublet of cam. The verb is derived from the noun and displaced the older verb kemb. Cognates Compare Saterland Frisian Koum, Swedish/Dutch kam, Danish kam, Norwegian kam, German Kamm; also Tocharian B keme, Lithuanian…
Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “comb” there
More English words
About this dictionary
The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.
Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.