rubbers
- 1Plural of rubber.
Grandpa still pulls rubbers over his good shoes on rainy days.
The bridge players agreed to play two more rubbers before dinner.
Note
A regular plural, but which rubber it multiplies depends on where you are. In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and Brunei, rubbers are erasers. In US and Canadian slang, they are condoms, a split worth remembering before borrowing one from a colleague abroad. For the material itself, the plural names different kinds of rubber, natural or synthetic, rather than separate objects.
- 2Waterproof overshoes made of rubber, worn over ordinary shoes to protect them from wet weather; galoshes.
Like waterproof boots that slide over your everyday shoes to keep them dry.
The schoolteacher insisted every child wear rubbers during the muddy spring thaw.
He stamped the snow from his rubbers on the porch step before coming inside.
Note
Footwear vocabulary that has fallen out of use. Galoshes and overshoes now cover the same ground, and either is the safe choice in present-day writing. Anyone reviving the old word in a North American setting should remember that the everyday plural carries a slang meaning of condoms there. That can make a period-flavored sentence about wet weather land rather differently than intended.
- 3A disease affecting sheep, marked by intense bodily heat and severe itching.
Several ewes developed rubbers during the unusually warm season.
He lost two lambs to rubbers before the vet identified the cause.
rubbers is a form of rubber
rubber, noun: A stretchy, elastic material (either tapped from certain trees or manufactured synthetically) that returns to its original shape after being stretched or bent. Full entry
- Forms
- rubberrubbers plural
- Spelling
- rubber → rubbers: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
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