glob
/ɡlɑb/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 2.48 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A millimeter-sized colour module found beyond the visual area V2 in the brain's parvocellular pathway.
noun
A limited pattern matching technique using wildcards, less powerful than a regular expression; such a pattern.
verb
To carry out pattern matching using a glob.
Example Sentences
- "He put a glob of paint into the cup and went on painting."
- "The windows stay stubbornly shut and keep in a sweltering heat. It’s been three days, but it seems longer—slow, like the time I imagine it’d take to melt a house of this size into a wax glob."
- "[…] paint globbed on the canvas, marring the careful shadowing he'd created on the snowbank. It was an amateurish mistake, completely unworthy of an artist of Teddy's skill."
- "In filename globbing, * means any character, group of characters, or no characters at all."
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 with the cytochrome-oxidase "blobs" of V1, an earlier stage in the hierarchical elaboration of colour.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: -
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ɡlɑb/
- British English: /ɡlɒb/