different between rubbish vs rubble

English

Etymology

From Middle English r?b?us (“rubbish, building rubble”), further origin uncertain; possibly from Anglo-Norman rubous, rubouse, rubbouse (“refuse, waste material; building rubble”), and compare Late Latin rebbussa, robousa, robusium, robusum, rubisum, rubusa, rubusium (although the Anglo-Norman and Latin words may be derived from the English word instead of the other way around). The English word may be related to rubble, though the connection is unclear.

The verb is derived from the noun.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /???b??/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /???b??/, /???-/
• Hyphenation: rub?bish

Noun

rubbish (usually uncountable, plural rubbishes)

1. (chiefly Australia, New Zealand, Britain) Refuse, waste, garbage, junk, trash.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:trash
2. (by extension, chiefly Australia, New Zealand, Britain) An item, or items, of low quality.
3. (by extension, chiefly Australia, New Zealand, Britain) Nonsense.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:nonsense
4. (archaic) Debris or ruins of buildings.

Alternative forms

• rubbage (now dialectal)

Derived terms

Related terms

• rubble (possibly)

Translations

Adjective

rubbish (comparative more rubbish, superlative most rubbish)

1. (chiefly Australia, New Zealand, Britain, colloquial) Exceedingly bad; awful.

   Synonyms: abysmal, crappy, horrendous, shitty, terrible; see also Thesaurus:bad, Thesaurus:low-quality

Translations

Interjection

rubbish (chiefly Australia, Britain, New Zealand, colloquial)

1. Used to express that something is exceedingly bad, awful, or terrible.

2. Used to express that what was recently said is nonsense or untrue; balderdash!, nonsense!

   Synonyms: bollocks, bullshit

Translations

Verb

rubbish (third-person singular simple present rubbishes, present participle rubbishing, simple past and past participle rubbished)

1. (transitive, chiefly Australia, Britain, New Zealand, colloquial) To criticize, to denigrate, to denounce, to disparage. [from c. 1950s (Australia, New Zealand)]

Derived terms

• rubbisher

Translations

References

Further reading

• waste on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Douglas Harper (2001–2021) , “rubbish”, in Online Etymology Dictionary

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