English
shrub
see also: Shrub
Pronunciation
  • (Southern England, America) enPR: shrŭb, IPA: /ʃɹʌb/
  • (Northern England, Ireland) IPA: /ʃɹʊb/
Etymology 1

From Middle English schrub, schrob, (also unassibilated as scrub), from Old English *sċrob (in placenames) and sċrybb ("a shrub; shrubbery; underbrush"); akin to Norwegian skrubbe.

Noun

shrub (plural shrubs)

  1. A woody plant smaller than a tree, and usually with several stems from the same base.
  2. (Kenya) A word mispronounced by replacing some consonant sounds with others of a similar place of articulation due to interference from one's knowledge of an indigenous Kenyan language.
Synonyms Translations Verb

shrub (shrubs, present participle shrubbing; simple past and past participle shrubbed)

  1. (obsolete) To lop; to prune.
  2. (transitive, Kenya) To mispronounce a word by replacing some consonant sounds with others of a similar place of articulation due to interference from one's knowledge of an indigenous Kenyan language.
  3. (rare) To plant a shrub in a yard, garden, etc.; to prune a bush or other plant into a shrub.
  4. (rare) To make or drink a shrub (liquor drink).
Etymology 2

From Arabic شِرَاب, شَرِبَ ("to drink"), akin to syrup, sherbet and sorbet.

Noun

shrub

  1. A liquor composed of vegetable acid, fruit juice (especially lemon), sugar, sometimes vinegar, and a small amount of spirit as a preservative. Modern shrub is usually non-alcoholic, but in earlier times it was often mixed with a substantial amount of spirit such as brandy or rum, thus making it a liqueur.
Shrub
Etymology

A play on his surname Bush, a shrub being a smaller bush, thus indicating that he is the junior Bush in relation to his father George H. W. Bush. Popularized by American newspaper columnist Molly Ivins (1944–2007), who co-wrote Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (2000) with Lou Dubose.

Proper noun
  1. (US politics, derogatory) George W. Bush (born 1946), the 43rd president of the United States (2001–2009).


This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.004
Offline English dictionary