Word.ws English Dictionary

frob

frob noun: any small device or object (usually hand-sized) which can be manipulated.

Noun

frob (plural frobs)

  1. (slang) Any small device or object (usually hand-sized) which can be manipulated.
    • Hand me that frob there, will you?

Verb

frob (third-person singular simple present frobs, present participle frobbing, simple past and past participle frobbed)

  1. (rare, slang, transitive) To manipulate in some ill-defined way; to tweak or mess about with.
    • I sketched about 30 different versions, then scanned them in and played around until I got it right, then frobbed it with Photoshop.1995, Wayne Ause, Instant HTML Web Pages, page 29
  2. (slang, Silicon Valley) To perform a task that is clear to the speaker but too complex or tedious to be explained, so that outside help is not helpful.
    • Why don't you go get lunch? I need to frob with this thing for about 30 minutes and then we'll be good to go.
  3. To transform and obscure in a trivial fashion with memfrob(3).

Forms of frob

Noun
pluralfrobs
Verb
third-person singular presentfrobs
present participlefrobbing
past participlefrobbed
pastfrobbed

Origin of frob

Clipping of frobnicate, from frobnitz, coined circa 1958 by David R. Sawyer of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). Year of origin uncertain, and could be 1958–1981: frob is not listed in the TMRC dictionaries of 1959 or 1960, and is first listed in the Jargon File (1981 edition), so it may date from the 1960s or 1970s. Possibly variant of or influenced by frotsus (“a protruding arm or trunnion”), which is listed in TMRC 1959 and 1960.

Questions about frob

What does frob mean?
Frob means any small device or object (usually hand-sized) which can be manipulated.
What part of speech is frob?
Frob can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of frob?
The plural of frob is frobs.

Words near frob in the dictionary

  1. fro yo
  2. fro yos
  3. fro-yo
  4. fro-yos
  5. froath
  6. frob
  7. frobbed
  8. frobbing
  9. Frobel
  10. Frobenioid
  11. Frobenioids

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: frob (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “frob.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/frob. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.