rub elbows
/ˌɹʌb ˈɛlˌboʊ̯z/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.30 in modern English
16
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "[I]f any of the officers have but mentioned love to my wife, I'll challenge and fight such of them one by one; and if any of the common soldiers have so much as rubbed elbows with her, I'll beat them like dogs from one end of the regiment to the other."
- "We have in fact nothing to say against the worthy purveyor, further than that he is an intruder when he rubs elbows with the regular audience, and that the utmost personal contact to which he should aspire, is that which makes an ice, a jelly or some other delicacy, the disconnecting instrument between his own hand and that of a customer."
- "One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting ghosts and shadows!"
- "[S]adness and poverty are never more intolerable than when hope and wealth rub elbows with them."
- "It was distasteful enough to rub elbows with an illiterate and vulgar white man of no ancestry,— […]"
- "He just wanted to rub elbows with this throng of young people. This was the joy of life he had imagined he had missed while in France."
Etymology
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌɹʌb ˈɛlˌboʊ̯z/
- British English: /ˌɹʌb ˈɛlˌbəʊ̯z/
Usage
- American usage
- Intransitive verb