Glib

//ɡlɪb// adj, noun, verb, slang

adj, noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person's mouth or tongue. UK, obsolete, slang

    ""Well, Sal, you mum your dubber pretty generally, but when you do slacken your glib you may as well do it civilly.""

  2. 2
    A mass of matted hair worn down over the eyes, formerly common in Ireland. historical

    "Whom when she saw in wretched weedes disguiz'd, / With heary glib deform'd and meiger face, / Like ghost late risen from his grave agryz'd, / She knew him not […]"

Verb
  1. 1
    To make smooth or slippery. transitive

    "1628, Joseph Hal, “Christian Liberty Laid Forth,” in The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God, Joseph Hall, D.D., Volume V, London: Williams & Smith, 1808, p. 366, https://books.google.ca/books?id=8iUBAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false There is a drunken liberty of the Tongue; which, being once glibbed with intoxicating liquor, runs wild through heaven and earth; and spares neither him that is God above, nor those which are called gods on earth."

  2. 2
    To castrate; to geld; to emasculate. obsolete

    "Fourteen they shall not see To bring false generations. They are co-heirs; And I had rather glib myself than they Should not produce fair issue."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Having a ready flow of words but lacking thought or understanding; superficial; shallow.

    "A much more thorough examination of this period is essential, and no glib answers should be accepted as good coin."

  2. 2
    Smooth or slippery. dated

    "a sheet of glib ice"

  3. 3
    Artfully persuasive but insincere in nature; smooth-talking, honey-tongued, silver-tongued.

    "a glib tongue; a glib speech"

  4. 4
    Snarky or unserious in a disrespectful way.

    "Its style is both open and arch, never verging on glib camp but always a little removed, reducing large emotions to small observations and thereby making them all the more effective."

Adjective
  1. 1
    artfully persuasive in speech wordnet
  2. 2
    having only superficial plausibility wordnet
  3. 3
    marked by lack of intellectual depth wordnet

Example

More examples

"He may come across as glib, but he knows what he's talking about."

Etymology

Etymology 1

A shortening of either English glibbery (“slippery”) or its source, Low German glibberig, glibberich (“slippery”) / Dutch glibberig (“slippery”).

Etymology 2

From Irish glib.

Etymology 3

Compare Old English and dialectal English lib (“to castrate, geld”), dialectal Danish live, Low German and Old Dutch lubben.

Related phrases

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.