garb

• IPA^(key): /ɡɑː(ɹ)b/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)b

From Middle French garbe ("graceful outline, silhouette"; > Modern French galbe), from Italian garbo (“grace, elegance”), from Germanic (compare Old High German garwi, garawi (“dress, equipment, preparation”), Middle High German gerwe (“outfitting, jewelry, clothing, robe, regalia”), modern German Gärbe, Gerbe and English gear), ultimately from Frankish *garwijan (“to prepare”), from Proto-Germanic *garwijaną (“to prepare”).

garb (countable and uncountable, plural garbs)

1. Fashion, style of dressing oneself up. [from late 16^thc.]
2. A type of dress or clothing. [from early 17^thc.]
   • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

     This new-comer was a man who in any company would have seemed striking. […] Indeed, all his features were in large mold, like the man himself, as though he had come from a day when skin garments made the proper garb of men.

3. (figurative) A guise, external appearance.
   • 1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i]:

     You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel.

garb (third-person singular simple present garbs, present participle garbing, simple past and past participle garbed)

1. (transitive) To dress in garb.

From French gerbe; akin to German Garbe. Doublet of gerbe.

garb (plural garbs)

1. (heraldry) A wheatsheaf.
2. A measure of arrows in the Middle Ages.
   • 1957, H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, page 118:

     Yorkshire supplied 500 bows, and 580 garbs of arrows, 360 of which had iron heads pointed with steel.

• ARGB, brag, grab

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡarp/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -arp
• Syllabification: garb

Inherited from Old Polish garb, from Proto-Slavic *gъrbъ.

garb m animal or m inan (diminutive garbek or garbik)

1. a hump (rounded fleshy mass)
2. a hump (deformity of the human back)
3. dead weight (that which is useless or excess)

   Synonyms: balast, obciążenie

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

garb

1. second-person singular imperative of garbić

• garb in Wielki słownik języka polskiego, Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN
• garb in Polish dictionaries at PWN