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Mar 17, 2020
This week’s themeReduplicatives
This week’s words
razzle-dazzle
hobnob
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with Anu Garghobnob
PRONUNCIATION:
(HOB-nob) 
MEANING:
verb intr.: To associate socially, especially with people of higher status.
ETYMOLOGY:
From the earlier phrase hobnob or hob-or-nob, used by two people to toast or drink to each other. It’s apparently from habnab meaning “give or take” or “hit or miss” from hab nab meaning “to have or have not”. Earliest documented use: 1761.
USAGE:
“I salivated at the mouth-watering prospect of hobnobbing with the big shots.”
Gideon Nkala; Surviving a Spinal Cord Injury; Mmegi (Gaborone, Botswana); Mar 14, 2011.
See more usage examples of hobnob in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.
Gideon Nkala; Surviving a Spinal Cord Injury; Mmegi (Gaborone, Botswana); Mar 14, 2011.
See more usage examples of hobnob in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. -Penelope Lively, writer (b. 17 Mar 1933)
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