gibbous

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
12
Words With Friends
16
Letters
7
Pronunciation
/ˈɡɪbəs/
See all 2 pronunciations
/ˈɡɪbəs/ · /ˈd͡ʒɪbəs/

Definition of gibbous

3 senses · 1 part of speech · etymology included

adj

  1. Curved or bulged outward.
    “In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]”
See all 3 definitions

adj

  1. Curved or bulged outward.
    “In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]”
  2. Having more than half (but not the whole) of its disc illuminated.
    “The moving moon, full, gibbous, or crescent-shaped, shone at last for the navigators of the eighteenth century like a luminous hand on the clock of heaven.”
    “On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a photograph of a gibbous Earth at a distance of eighteen thousand miles from its surface.”
  3. Humpbacked.
    “A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back;”

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

From Middle English gibbous, from Latin gibbus (“humped, hunched”), probably cognate with cubō (“bend oneself, lie down”), Italian gobba (“humpback”), Ancient Greek κῡφός (kūphós, “humpback, bent”), κύβος (kúbos, “cube, vertebra”), Spanish giboso (“humped”). Also ultimately compare dialectal Norwegian keiv (“slanted, wrong”), German schief (“crooked, slanting”) and Dutch scheef (“crooked, slanting”).

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