swab
noun/swɒb/
/swɑːb/
- a piece of soft material used by a doctor, nurse, etc. for cleaning wounds or taking a sample from somebody’s body for testing see also cotton swabTopics Healthcarec2
Want to learn more?
Find out which words work together and produce more natural sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app.
- an act of taking a sample from somebody’s body, with a swab
- to take a throat swab
Word Originmid 17th cent. (in the sense ‘mop for cleaning the decks’): back-formation from swabber ‘sailor detailed to swab decks’, from early modern Dutch zwabber, from a Germanic base meaning ‘splash’ or ‘sway’.
Check pronunciation:
swab