Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as comb.
  • noun Same as comb.
  • noun Same as coom.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A dry measure of four bushels, or half a quarter.
  • noun A hollow in a hillside. [Prov. Eng.] See comb, combe.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An old English measure of corn (e.g., wheat), equal to half a quarter or 4 bushels. Also comb.
  • noun Alternative spelling of combe.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

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.

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Examples

  • The Treasury lawyers need to go through the pension contract with a fine tooth coomb and find a get out clause.

    Smoking Guns and the Morality of Parliamentary Privilege 2009

  • 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? 2009

  • 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.

    Shaun Casey: Forgetting Sonia Sotomayor 2009

  • 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.

    Wessex Tales 2006

  • 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.

    Wessex Tales 2006

  • ‘Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb — hey?’ said the engaged man of fifty.

    Wessex Tales 2006

  • 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.

    Wild Wales : Its People, Language and Scenery 2004

  • I asked him the name of the ravine and he told me it was Ceunant Coomb or hollow-dingle coomb.

    Wild Wales : Its People, Language and Scenery 2004

  • I bethought me, however, to try the creek which drained the coomb, and see whether it might not have made itself a smoother way.

    Erewhon 2003

  • Off course we all know whey this warty do no coomb, becourgh the tangs they are awl freezup, awl on they, awl they freezop.

    A Spaniard in the Works John Lennon 2000

Comments

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  • ...a coomb of dangerous and very stony ground, where a slip might have given me a disastrous fall.

    - Samuel Butler, Erewhon

    July 18, 2008