# limb
## English
### Pronunciation

* IPA: /lɪm/
* Audio (US):(file)
* Rhymes: -ɪm
* Homophones: limn, Lymm

### Etymology 1

From Middle English lyme, lim, from Old English lim (“limb, branch”), from Proto-West Germanic *limu, from Proto-Germanic *limuz (“branch, limb”). Cognate with Old Norse limr (“limb”).
The spelling with the silent unetymological -b first arose in the late 1500s. Compare crumb.

#### Noun

limb (plural limbs)
* A major appendage of human or animal, used for locomotion (such as an arm, leg or wing).
** c. 1587–1588, [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire, London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act III, scene iii:UUhoſe hands are made to gripe a warlike Lance— Their ſhoulders broad, for complet armour fit, Their lims more large and of a bigger ſize Than all the brats yſprong from Typhons loins:
** 1914 November, Louis Joseph Vance, “An Outsider […]”, in Munsey’s Magazine, volume LIII, number II, New York, N.Y.: The Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Company, […], published 1915, →OCLC, chapter I (Anarchy), pages 377–378:Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with […] on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs.
* A branch of a tree.
    Synonym: bough
* (archery) The part of the bow, from the handle to the tip.
* An elementary piece of the mechanism of a lock.
* A thing or person regarded as a part or member of, or attachment to, something else.
** 1814 July 7, [Walter Scott], Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC:That little limb of the devil has cheated the gallows.
* Short for limb of Satan (“a wicked or mischievous child”).

##### Derived terms

* CHILD syndrome
* go out on a limb
* hind limb
* life and limb
* limb brightening
* limb darkening
* limb from limb
* limb-mammary syndrome
* limbmeal
* limb of the law
* mooselimb
* out on a limb
* phantom limb
* risk life and limb
* risk one's life and limb
* Roux limb

##### Translations

    The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

#### Verb

limb (third-person singular simple present limbs, present participle limbing, simple past and past participle limbed)
* (transitive) To remove the limbs from (an animal or tree).
    They limbed the felled trees before cutting them into logs.
* (transitive) To supply with limbs.
** 1667, John Milton, “(please specify the page number)”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC:Innumerous living creatures , perfect forms , Limb'd and full grown: out of the ground uprose
** 1859, Henry D. Thoreau, Walden:Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him.

##### Synonyms

* delimb

##### Translations
### Etymology 2

From Latin limbus (“border”).

#### Noun

limb (plural limbs)
* (astronomy) The apparent visual edge of a celestial body.
    the solar limb
** 1870, United States Naval Observatory, Reports on Observations of the Total Eclipse of the Sun, August, 7, 1869, page 174:At 4h 57m 9s by my chronometer, (see Schedule B,) I observed with my telescope a small black speck on the preceding limb of the sun's disk, at the precise point to which I had been for some minutes directing my attention.
** 2015, Ludmilla Kolokolova, James Hough, Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd, Polarimetry of Stars and Planetary Systems, page 449:Chandrasekhar (1946a, b) predicted that the limb of a star will be polarized, because photons scattered at the limb and toward the observer experience a scattering angle of Θ ≈ 90°.
* (on a measuring instrument) The graduated edge of a circle or arc.
* (botany) The border or upper spreading part of a monopetalous corolla, or of a petal or sepal; blade.
** 1945, “A new form of the moonvine Calonyction aculeatum with divided corolla limb, and length-of-day behavior and flowering of the common form”, in Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, volume 35, number 2:The corolla limb of the moonvine Calonyction aculeatum is normally undivided.

##### Derived terms

* limb-brightened
* limb-brightening
* limb-darkened
* limb-darkening

##### Translations
### See also

Picture dictionary :
limb :
* armarm
* legleg
* wingwing
* bowbow

### Anagrams

* blim