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rubbing

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈɹʌbɪŋ//

An impression of an embossed or incised surface made by placing a piece of paper over it and rubbing with graphite, crayon or other coloring agent.

noun

  1. 1

    An impression of an embossed or incised surface made by placing a piece of paper over it and rubbing with graphite, crayon or other coloring agent.

    He was delighted to come across a little-worn crest of the old Great Eastern Railway, never dreaming that such a relic would still be in use, and was taking a pencil-rubbing to add to his collection.

Etymology

From Middle English rubbinge, rubbynge, equivalent to rub + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of rubpresent participle and gerund of rub

Etymology

From rub + -ing.

Forms

plural
rubbings
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).