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''garb'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔

garb - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

garb (countable and uncountable, plural garbs)

  • Fashion, style of dressing oneself up. [from late 16 c.]
  • A type of dress or clothing. [from early 17 c.]
    • ✤ 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.1
  • (figurative) A guise, external appearance.
    • ✤ You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel.2

Verb

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

  • (transitive) To dress in garb.
    • ✤ Synonyms: habit, habilitate

Noun

garb (plural garbs)

  • (heraldry) A wheatsheaf.
  • A measure of arrows in the Middle Ages.
    • ✤ Yorkshire supplied 500 bows, and 580 garbs of arrows, 360 of which had iron heads pointed with steel.3

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ɡɑː(ɹ)b/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)b

Etymology 1

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”).

Etymology 2

From Middle English garbe, from Old French garbe, variant of jarbe; akin to German Garbe. Doublet of gerbe.

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 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]: ↩

  3. 1957, H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, page 118: ↩

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Secondary

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