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cub

nounverbnounattested in dialogue

  • United States//kʌb//
  • Ireland//kʊb//

The young of certain animals, chiefly large carnivorous mammals, including the bear, wolf, fox, lion and tiger.

noun

  1. 1

    The young of certain animals, chiefly large carnivorous mammals, including the bear, wolf, fox, lion and tiger.

    a Childe of Lacedemon suffered all his belly and gutts to be torne out by a Cubbe or young Foxe, which he had stolne, and kept close under his garment, rather then he would discover his theft.

  2. 2

    A child, especially an awkward, rude, ill-mannered boy.

    O, thou dissembling cub! what wilt thou be / When time hath sowed a grizzle on thy case?

    He had also kept with him two wild young wives and several wilder cubs.

  3. 3

    slangA young man who seeks relationships with older women, or "cougars".

  4. 4

    obsoleteA stall for cattle.

    [...] I would rather have such a good mother in cub or kennel, than in my closet, or at my table.

  5. 5

    Synonym of cub reporter.

    Swain has interviewed 67 reporters on 16 metropolitan dailies in 10 cities — from cubs to veterans — who talk candidly […]

    […] from competing publications and the editors of publications that might buy freelance material from cubs.

  6. 6

    slangA furry character that is a child (i.e. under the age of adulthood).

  7. 7

    A boy or young man.

    A man who reared ten cubs and three cutties.

    The point of the example is educational, moral, and the moral qualities of the stories attracted Peter Flanagan who remembered them from childhood and told them to the cutties and cubs when he was, for them, a funny old man.

  8. 8

    slanga younger (or younger-looking) "bear" type of man.

  9. 9

    Variant of cub porn or cub artslangClipping of cub porn or cub art.

    Ew, I didn't know he also drew cub...

Etymology

From earlier cubbe. Origin unknown. According to Pokorny, from Proto-Germanic *kubb-, from Proto-Indo-European *gup- (“round object, knoll”), from *gew- (“to bend, curve, convex, arch, vault”). Related terms include cup (cf. cupboard), coffin, cove, etc, essentially “chamber”, thus cub maybe initially derived from the sense “den”, or maybe “womb”. A probable cognate is also found in North Germanic: dialectal Swedish kubbe, kybbe, köbbe, kibb, Danish kippe (“calf”). Also compare Icelandic and Old Norse kobbi (“seal”), Old Irish cuib (“whelp”). Compare also English cob. Originally, the meaning was specifically "young fox", in which sense it has largely replaced English whelp.

verb

  1. 1

    To give birth to cubs.

  2. 2

    To hunt fox cubs.

    He knew that, only a few hours from London, the Hunt was cubbing over his ancestral and much-mortgaged acres, while his own horse ate its head off in a stable.

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo shut up or confine.

    to fall from heaven to hell, to be cubbed up upon a sudden

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of cashed-up boganAcronym of cashed-up bogan.

Forms

plural
cubs
past tense
cubbed
past participle
cubbed
present participle
cubbing
third person singular
cubs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).