cob
noun
a corncob.
cob
1 American
[kob]
/ kɒb /
noun
-
cobs
plural
-
a corncob.
-
a male swan.
-
a short-legged, thick-set horse, often having a high gait and frequently used for driving.
-
British. a mixture of clay and straw, used as a building material.
-
British Dialect. a rounded mass or lump.
-
a crude silver or gold Spanish-American coin of the 16th to 18th centuries, characteristically irregular in shape and bearing only a partial impression of the dies from which it was struck.
COB
2
American
abbreviation
Business.
cob
1
British
/ kɒb /
noun
-
a male swan
-
a thickset short-legged type of riding and draught horse
-
short for corncob corncob pipe cobnut
-
another name for hazel
-
a small rounded lump or heap of coal, ore, etc
-
a building material consisting of a mixture of clay and chopped straw
-
Also called: cob loaf. a round loaf of bread
verb
cob
2
British
/ kɒb /
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of cob
First recorded in 1375–1425; late Middle English cobbe “male swan, leader of a gang”; these and various subsequent senses are obscurely related and probably in part of distinct origin
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Some are molded into corn on the cob, celery and rhubarb shapes.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 1, 2026
Ribs, hot dogs, fried chicken, corn on the cob, watermelon slices.
From Salon ● Jul. 3, 2025
California earlier this year rejected citizen-led proposals to adopt cob, hemp-lime and light straw clay in its code, and recently rejected a petition to reconsider.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 28, 2025
Meanwhile, I can barely look at a corn on the cob without flinching.
From Salon ● Dec. 15, 2024
He found an old corn cob lying by the side of the road and started playing with it.
From "Summer of the Monkeys" by Wilson Rawls
The COB has joined calls for Paz to step down.
From Barron's ● May 18, 2026
COB Commissioner Kimberley Taylor-Riley blamed a bureaucratic maze that follows police shootings.
From Seattle Times ● May 5, 2021
“I need this done by COB tomorrow,” Manafort emailed Gates at 3 a.m. the next day.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 10, 2018
Rather it was to examine the six documents in dossier number 12801/subsection 326, codename "COB", for traces of anything incriminating.
From BBC ● Feb. 25, 2018
Therefore the angle POP' is constant, being equal to half the constant angle AOC + COB.
From An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry by Derrick Norman Lehmer
Summer may have technically ended, but it will still be some time before peak cobs of corn are not abundant at the grocer.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 29, 2026
It looks like charcoal, but the black briquettes are actually made from plant waste: millet and sesame stalks, palm fronds and cobs.
From Barron's ● Apr. 24, 2026
Within an hour, the cobs will be inside a refrigerated pack-house and chilled down to 0C.
From BBC ● Feb. 18, 2026
Above, a large skylight is adorned with hundreds of suspended corn cobs, their illuminated forms offering one of the few sources of light in the dark and moody, monochromatic space.
From Salon ● Oct. 13, 2024
Mangelsdorf’s side found itself on the defensive; litis had gleefully pointed out that the “wild maize” cobs from the Tehuacan Valley were identical to those of an unusual, fully domesticated variety of popcorn from Argentina.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
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