Glob

//ɡlɑb// noun, verb

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A round, shapeless or amorphous lump, as of a semisolid substance.

    "He put a glob of paint into the cup and went on painting."

  2. 2
    A limited pattern matching technique using wildcards, less powerful than a regular expression; such a pattern.
  3. 3
    a compact mass wordnet
  4. 4
    A millimeter-sized colour module found beyond the visual area V2 in the brain's parvocellular pathway.
Verb
  1. 1
    To stick in globs or lumps.

    "[…] paint globbed on the canvas, marring the careful shadowing he'd created on the snowbank. It was an amateurish mistake, completely unworthy of an artist of Teddy's skill."

  2. 2
    To carry out pattern matching using a glob.

    "In filename globbing, * means any character, group of characters, or no characters at all."

Etymology

Etymology 1

Possibly a blend of blob + gob, or a clipping of globule. An element of sound symbolism is clearly involved: compare such phonetically and semantically similar words as glop, gop, lob, blob, lump, clump and clod. (Still, globe, clump and clod may be related via the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-; compare clew.) In the biological sense, proposed by Bevil R. Conway and Doris Y. Tsao, by analogy with the cytochrome-oxidase "blobs" of V1, an earlier stage in the hierarchical elaboration of colour.

Etymology 2

Possibly a blend of blob + gob, or a clipping of globule. An element of sound symbolism is clearly involved: compare such phonetically and semantically similar words as glop, gop, lob, blob, lump, clump and clod. (Still, globe, clump and clod may be related via the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-; compare clew.) In the biological sense, proposed by Bevil R. Conway and Doris Y. Tsao, by analogy with the cytochrome-oxidase "blobs" of V1, an earlier stage in the hierarchical elaboration of colour.

Etymology 3

Originates from the early (c. 1970) Unix command glob; clipping of global.

Etymology 4

Originates from the early (c. 1970) Unix command glob; clipping of global.

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