absorb
Definitions
General English
- verb to reduce a shock
Accounting
- verb to assign an overhead to a particular cost centre in a company’s production accounts so that its identity becomes lost.
Computing
Medical
Publishing
- verb to take in a small item so as to form part of a larger one
Origin & History of “absorb”
Absorb comes, via French absorber, from Latin absorbēre, a compound verb formed from the prefix ab- ‘away’ and sorbēre ‘suck up, swallow’. Words connected with drinking and swallowing quite often contain the sounds s or sh, r, and b or p – Arabic, for instance, has surāb, which gave us syrup – and this noisy gulping seems to have been reflected in an Indo-European base, *srobh-, which lies behind both Latin sorbēre and Greek ropheī́n ‘suck up’.
