sob

Formssobs, sobbing, sobbed

Pluralsobs

1. 1
   verbintransitive

   To cry hard, drawing breath in sudden, convulsive gasps.

   He sobbed into his hands long after the funeral ended.

   She fought hard not to sob in front of her coworkers.

   Similarweep, cry, bawl, blubber, wail

   Note

   The weeping verb stands on its own, with no object: she sobbed, she was sobbing. Dryden's Virgil of 1697 pairs it with sighing ("She sigh'd, she sobb'd"), and the pair still shows the difference: a sigh is one long breath out, while sobbing breaks the breath into pieces. A preposition can give it direction (sobbed into his hands). Give it words to carry and it becomes the speech verb.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A cry produced with a brief, sudden release of breath.

   Her voice broke into a sob halfway through the speech.

   The room fell silent except for the occasional sob.

   Similarcry, wail

   Note

   Behind the word is probably a mouth rather than tears: Middle English sobben, perhaps from Middle Low German sabben, "to drool, slobber," with cousins in Dutch zabben and German sabbern meaning to suck or drool. The link is uncertain, but the family is one of wet, involuntary mouth noises. As a noun it names a single catch of breath, so it counts easily (a sob, the occasional sob), while the weeping verb covers the whole bout.

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To utter something while weeping with convulsive gasps.

   She sobbed his name into the phone.

   Between gasps, he managed to sob a few broken words.

   Similarblubber, wail, cry, weep

   Note

   Here the weeping becomes a way of speaking: sob joins said, cried and whispered as a verb that reports words. Its most natural home is right after direct speech, as in "He doesn't love me!" she sobbed, where the object is the spoken line itself. It can also take an ordinary object, like a name, but without one it slips back into the simple act of weeping.

4. 4
   nouncountableonomatopoeic

   The audible sound produced by someone sobbing.

   A low sob broke the silence of the empty chapel.

   He recognized the sob in her breathing even over the phone.

   Similarcry, wail

   Note

   On the page, the word can stand in for the noise itself. George Carter Stent's The Jade Chaplet in Twenty-four Beads (1874) breaks a widow's lament with "(sob, sob)" between the words, the way a script marks a pause. Used like this it works as a stage direction inside the sentence. It is set in brackets, often doubled, and kept outside the grammar of the line around it.

5. 5
   verbtransitive or intransitive

   To soak: to drench something with water or become thoroughly wet.

   Days of steady rain had sobbed the clay until it would hold no more.

   Farmers would let the hides sob in the trough for a week.

   Similarsoak, saturate, drench, steep

   Note

   A separate word that happens to share the spelling. It is related to sop and has nothing to do with weeping. John Mortimer's The Whole Art of Husbandry (1707) uses it of timber: "the Tree, being sobbed and wet, swells the Wood." There the past participle sits beside wet almost as an adjective. A modern reader will hear crying first, so the word needs a context of soaking to be understood this way.

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