Rub

Rub

Verb / Noun · /rʌb/ · to press and move against a surface; an act of rubbing

Definition

To rub is to press something against a surface and move it back and forth with friction. As a verb it covers everything from rubbing your eyes when tired, to rubbing a sauce into meat before cooking, to rubbing two sticks together to make fire. As a noun, a rub is either an act of rubbing — give it a rub — or a dry seasoning mixture pressed into meat before grilling or smoking. Rub also carries figurative weight: there's the rub means that is the difficulty or complication.

Origin

From Middle English rubben, which appeared in the fourteenth century and is thought to share roots with Low German and Scandinavian words for scraping and rubbing. The exact origin is uncertain — the word may be of imitative origin, reflecting the physical sensation. Shakespeare famously used there's the rub in Hamlet's To be or not to be soliloquy, giving the noun its philosophical dimension that persists in formal English today.