Word.ws English Dictionary

gibbous

Syllables: gib·bous/ˈɡɪbəs/

gibbous adjective: curved or bulged outward.

gibbous: curved or bulged outward
Image: Thomas Bresson, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

gibbous (comparative more gibbous, superlative most gibbous)

  1. Curved or bulged outward.
    • In fact, what these gibbous human shapes specially represented was ready money—money insistently ready [...]1886 May, Thomas Hardy, “chapter 22”, in The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character. […], volume I, London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], →OCLC
  2. Having more than half (but not the whole) of its disc illuminated.
    • The moving moon, full, gibbous, or crescent-shaped, shone at last for the navigators of the eighteenth century like a luminous hand on the clock of heaven.1995, Dava Sobel, Longitude, Herper Perennial, published 2011, →ISBN, page 89
    • On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a photograph of a gibbous Earth at a distance of eighteen thousand miles from its surface.2021, Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, Canongate Books, published 2022, page 252
  3. Humpbacked.
    • A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black,
      Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back;1697, Virgil, “The Eighth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC

gibbous meaning in Urdu and Bengali

gibbous in Urdu

کبڑا

gibbous in Bengali

উত্তল, কুঁজো

Synonyms of gibbous

All synonyms of gibbous

Forms of gibbous

comparativemore gibbous
superlativemost gibbous

Origin of gibbous

From Middle English gibbous, from Latin gibbus (“humped, hunched”), probably cognate with cubō (“bend oneself, lie down”), Italian gobba (“humpback”), Ancient Greek κῡφός (kūphós, “humpback, bent”), κύβος (kúbos, “cube, vertebra”), Spanish giboso (“humped”). Also ultimately compare dialectal Norwegian keiv (“slanted, wrong”), German schief (“crooked, slanting”) and Dutch scheef (“crooked, slanting”).

Words formed from gibbous

Phrases with gibbous

Words that rhyme with gibbous

Questions about gibbous

What does gibbous mean?
Gibbous means curved or bulged outward.
What is gibbous in Urdu?
Gibbous in Urdu is کبڑا. See Gibbous meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is gibbous?
Gibbous is an adjective.
How do you pronounce gibbous?
Gibbous is pronounced /ˈɡɪbəs/.

Words near gibbous in the dictionary

  1. Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term
  2. gibbose
  3. gibbosely
  4. gibbosities
  5. gibbosity
  6. gibbous
  7. gibbous moon
  8. gibbous moons
  9. gibbously
  10. gibbousness
  11. Gibbs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gibbous (page history and authors); gibbous (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); gibbous (Bengali Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-gibbous.wav.

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