Definitions
Etymologies
- Anglo-Saxon cumb a liquid measure, perhaps from Latin cumba boat, tomb of stone, from Ancient Greek hollow of a vessel, cup, boat, but compare German Kumpf bowl. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The Treasury lawyers need to go through the pension contract with a fine tooth coomb and find a get out clause.”
“Her triumph over obstacles ranging from the pedestrian to the inconvenient (growing up in the richest city in the world, attending law school, and having a disease the treatment of which was discovered more than 40 years ago), has created what will be a short lived coomb-bye-yaa with most of the major voting blocs in the country.”
“The OED defines “coomb” both as a boiling receptacle and as “a sharp and steep ravine where streams all rush downhill”.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » Commas and Periods — Inside Closing Quotation Marks or Outside Them?
“At the second time of closing in they found themselves near a lonely ash, the single tree on this part of the coomb, probably sown there by a passing bird some fifty years before.”
“But, though the wind up here blew unmistakably when it did blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathers of the winter season were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they were imagined to be by dwellers on low ground.”
“‘Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb — hey?’ said the engaged man of fifty.”
“I asked him the name of the ravine and he told me it was Ceunant Coomb or hollow-dingle coomb.”
“I asked the name of the brook, and he told me that it was called the brook of the hollow-dingle coomb, adding that it ran under Pont Newydd, though where that was I knew not.”
“I bethought me, however, to try the creek which drained the coomb, and see whether it might not have made itself a smoother way.”
“Off course we all know whey this warty do no coomb, becourgh the tangs they are awl freezup, awl on they, awl they freezop.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘coomb’.
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English Weights and Measures
Most of these are names of weights and measures in use before 1500, gleaned from household accounts of English estates and colleges.
pondus, clove, wey, charrus, pisa, sum, seam, petra, fatt, peck, quarter, skep and 49 more...
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noble mythical words
halcyon, yore, chevalier, geas, dour, clarion, codex, selkie, mythic, rime, hoarfrost, eldritch and 112 more...
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Landscape
riparian, littoral, talus, fen, ambit, savanna, remnant prairie, shortgrass prairie, tallgrass prairie, marsh, swamp, marshy and 199 more...
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The Good Soldier
Words taken from The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.
concatenation, vorticist, imagiste, auk, acquaintanceship, perforce, tapageu, jeunes, minuet, outsound, sedulous, goodheartedness and 105 more...
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Vocab
prurient, salient, inextricable, moribund, rarified, mawkish, ignominy, lummox, pedantic, censure, adjunct, sirocco and 31 more...
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The Old Farmstead
quickset, bigg, bullimung, simila, grudgins, misulane, hemp, milk-pan, churn, verjuice, rewannum, hurdle and 83 more...
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Words I had to Look Up. Srsly.
These are words I've encountered reading that I've had to look up on-the-spot.
execrable, ex cathedra, liminal, elegiac, synecdoche, desuetude, disingenuous, parallelopiped, vulpine, probity, amanuensis, mustelid and 67 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for coomb.
yarb ...a coomb of dangerous and very stony ground, where a slip might have given me a disastrous fall.
- Samuel Butler, Erewhon Jul 18, 2008