blub

blub

English

Etymology

Compare bleb and blob.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /blʌb/

• Audio (southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌb

Verb

blub (third-person singular simple present blubs, present participle blubbing, simple past and past participle blubbed)

1. To cry, whine or blubber (usually carries a connotation of disapproval).
   • 1935, Arthur Leo Zagat, Girl of the Goat God, in Dime Mystery Magazine, November 1935, Chapter IV,

     The grotesquely ornamented goats, crazed by the Hamelin piping, stampeded toward him. They piled up, shoving one another from the causeway, screaming with almost human agony as the black mud and the quicksand caught them, screaming till their shrieks blubbed into silence.

   • 1953, C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, Chapter 1:

     Yes. I know where she is. She's blubbing behind the gym. Shall I fetch her out?

   • 1989, William Trevor, "Children of the Headmaster," in Collected Stories, Penguin, 1992, p. 1235-6,

     Baddle, Thompson-Wright and Wardle had been caned for giving cheek. Thompson-Wright had blubbed, the others hadn't.

   • 1991, Stephen Fry, The Liar, London: Heinemann, OCLC 59891543, page 35:

     ‘He... he made me cry, sir, and I was too embarrassed to come in blubbing, so I went and hid in the music-room until I felt better.’
     This was all terribly unfair on poor old Biffin, whom Adrian rather adored for his snowy hair and perpetual air of benign astonishment. And ‘blubbing’... Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad new language to start up. Nineteen-twenties schoolboy slang could be due for a revival.

2. (obsolete) To swell; to puff out, as with weeping.

Noun

blub (plural blubs)

1. The act of blubbing.
   • 1857, William Platt, Mothers and Sons: A Story of Real Life, London: Charles J. Skeet, Vol. 1, Chapter IX, p. 150,

     […] hang me, then, if I've the heart to come again to the old place, till I've had a thorough good blub, and that's the fact of it […]

Adjective

blub (not comparable)

1. (attributively) Swollen, puffed, protruding.
   • 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses (novel), Vintage International (1990), page 80:

     He's not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening.

Anagrams

• bulb