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comb

Pronunciation: /kəʊm/

The English word “comb” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A toothed implement for grooming the hair or (formerly) for keeping it in place.
  2. A machine used in separating choice cotton fibers from worsted cloth fibers.
  3. The toothed plate at the top and bottom of an escalator that prevents objects getting trapped between the moving stairs and fixed landings.
  4. A toothed tool used for chasing screws on work in a lathe; a chaser.
  5. The notched scale of a wire micrometer.
  6. The collector of an electrical machine, usually resembling a comb.
  7. A toothed plate used for creating wells in agar gels for electrophoresis.
  8. A toothed wooden pick used to push the weft thread tightly against the previous pass of thread to create a tight weave.
  9. One of a pair of peculiar organs on the base of the abdomen in scorpions, with which they comb substrate.
  10. A ctene.
  11. A fleshy growth on the top of the head of some birds and reptiles; crest.
  12. A crest (of metal, leather, etc) on a piece of armor, especially on a helmet.
  13. The top part of a gun’s stock.
  14. A structure of hexagon cells made by bees for storing honey; honeycomb.
  15. The main body of a harmonica containing the air chambers and to which the reed plates are attached.
  16. A former, commonly cone-shaped, used in hat manufacturing for hardening soft fibre.
  17. An old English measure of corn equal to the half quarter.
  18. The curling crest of a wave; a comber.
  19. 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.
  20. 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…

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