glob

Plural: globs

Noun

A rounded, shapeless mass of a soft or viscous substance.
a compact mass
A round, shapeless or amorphous lump, as of a semisolid substance.
A millimeter-sized colour module found beyond the visual area V2 in the brain's parvocellular pathway.
A limited pattern matching technique using wildcards, less powerful than a regular expression.

Verb

To stick in globs or lumps.
To carry out pattern matching using a glob.

Examples

He dropped a glob of letters onto the board, hoping to form a word.
He put a glob of paint into the cup and went on painting.

Origin / Etymology

Possibly a blend of blob + gob or a clipping of globule. An element of sound symbolism is clearly involved: compare such phonetically and semantically similar words as glop, gop, blob, clump and clod. (Still, globe, clump and clod may be related via the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-; compare clew.)
In the biological sense, proposed by Bevil R. Conway and Doris Y. Tsao, by analogy with the cytochrome-oxidase "blobs" of V1, an earlier stage in the hierarchical elaboration of colour.

Synonyms

ball, chunk, clod, clump, lump

Scrabble Score: 7

glob: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Word
glob: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
glob: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary

Words With Friends Score: 10

glob: valid Words With Friends Word