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glob

Pronunciation: /ɡlɑb/

The English word “glob” has 5 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A round, shapeless or amorphous lump, as of a semisolid substance.
  2. A millimeter-sized colour module found beyond the visual area V2 in the brain's parvocellular pathway.
  3. A limited pattern matching technique using wildcards, less powerful than a regular expression; such a pattern.

verb

  1. To stick in globs or lumps.
  2. To carry out pattern matching using a glob.

Etymology

Possibly a blend of blob + gob, or a clipping of globule. An element of sound symbolism is clearly involved: compare such phonetically and semantically similar words as glop, gop, lob, blob, lump, clump and clod. (Still, globe, clump and clod may be related via the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-; compare clew.) In the biological sense, proposed by Bevil R. Conway and Doris Y. Tsao, by analogy…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.