different between grubble vs rubble

English

Etymology

From grub +? -le, frequentative, but compare grabble.

Verb

grubble (third-person singular simple present grubbles, present participle grubbling, simple past and past participle grubbled)

1. (obsolete, transitive, intransitive) To feel or grope in the dark.

Synonyms

• fumble, grabble; see also Thesaurus:feel around

English

Etymology

From Middle English rouble, rubel, robel, robeil, from Anglo-Norman *robel (“bits of broken stone”). Presumably related to rubbish, originally of same meaning (bits of stone). Ultimately presumably from Proto-Germanic *raub- (“to break”), perhaps via Old French robe (English rob (“steal”)) in sense of “plunder, destroy”; see also Middle English, Middle French -el.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /???b.?l/
• Rhymes: -?b?l

Noun

rubble (countable and uncountable, plural rubbles)

1. The broken remains of an object, usually rock or masonry.
   • 1975, Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift [Avon ed., 1976, p. 72]:

     The old boulevard now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. … You'd have to loathe yourself vividly to be indifferent to such destruction or, worse, rejoice at the crushing of the locus of these middle-class settlements, glad that history had made rubble of them.
2. (geology) A mass or stratum of fragments of rock lying under the alluvium and derived from the neighbouring rock.
   • 1855, Sir Charles Lyell, A Manual of Elementary Geology

     The overlying beds are composed of such calcareous rubble and flints, rudely stratified

3. (Britain, dialect, in the plural) The whole of the bran of wheat before it is sorted into pollard, bran, etc..

Derived terms

• reduce to rubble
• rubblestone
• rubblework

Related terms

• rubbish

Translations

References

Anagrams

• beblur, burble, lubber, rebulb