limb

• IPA^(key): /lɪm/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪm
• Homophones: limn, Lymm

From Middle English lyme, lim, from Old English lim (“limb, branch”), from Proto-Germanic *limuz (“branch, limb”). Cognate with Old Norse limr (“limb”). The silent -b began to appear in the late 1500s.

limb (plural limbs)

1. A major appendage of human or animal, used for locomotion (such as an arm, leg or wing).
   • 1914, Louis Joseph Vance, chapter I, in Nobody, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, published 1915, OCLC 40817384:

     Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with […] on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs.

2. A branch of a tree.
3. (archery) The part of the bow, from the handle to the tip.
4. An elementary piece of the mechanism of a lock.
5. A thing or person regarded as a part or member of, or attachment to, something else.
   • (Can we date this quote?) Sir Walter Scott

     That little limb of the devil has cheated the gallows.

• go out on a limb

limb (third-person singular simple present limbs, present participle limbing, simple past and past participle limbed)

1. (transitive) To remove the limbs from (an animal or tree).

   They limbed the felled trees before cutting them into logs.

2. (transitive) To supply with limbs.
   • Henry D. Thoreau, Walden:

     Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Milton to this entry?)

• delimb

From Latin limbus (“border”).

limb (plural limbs)

1. (astronomy) The apparent visual edge of a celestial body.

   solar limb

2. (on a measuring instrument) The graduated edge of a circle or arc.
3. (botany) The border or upper spreading part of a monopetalous corolla, or of a petal or sepal; blade.

• blim