Wiktionary

clobber

English

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Pronunciation

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Etymology 1

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British slang from 1941; possibly onomatopoeic of the sound of detonated bombs in the distance.

Verb

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clobber (third-person singular simple present clobbers, present participle clobbering, simple past and past participle clobbered)

  1. (transitive, slang) To hit or bash severely; to seriously harm or damage.
    • 1954, Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle, published 1984, page 201:
      So the temptation to clobber was always there, and it was sometimes more difficult not to strike than it would have been to strike, and the consequences be damned.
    • 2000 November 30, Kenya National Assembly Official Record (Hansard), page 3034,
      Mr. Speaker, Sir, in the East African Standard newspaper we saw a picture of a man being carried away after being clobbered. We also saw women being clobbered by well-built policemen using big clubs. They were clobbering women who had already fallen on the ground.
    • 2002, Donald K. Burleson, Oracle9i UNIX Administration Handbook‎[1], page 395:
      Most of the job of the UNIX Oracle DBA is keeping the database running, and it does not come as a surprise when they see how easy it is to clobber a server.
      The following script cripples the UNIX server by an implosion of incoming jobs. This is known as a denial of service (DOS) attack […] .
  2. (transitive, computing, slang) To overwrite (data) or override (an assignment of a value), often unintentionally or unexpectedly.
    • 1965 November, Charles W. Adams, “Responsive time-shared computing in business its significance and implications”, in AFIPS '65 (Fall, part I): Proceedings of the November 30--December 1, 1965, fall joint computer conference, part I‎[2], New York, N.Y.: Association for Computing Machinery, archived from the original on 2022-05-11, page 486:
      It is therefore clear that the system itself must be truly "clobber proof"; that is, no user may be capable of changing anyone else's program or tying up the system in any way that would disrupt normal service to other users.
    • 1966, George A. Miller, “Thinking machines: myths and actualities”, in Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, editors, The Public Interest‎[3], volume 2, New York, N.Y.: National Affairs, Inc., archived from the original on 2022-05-11, page 104:
      In the slang of computer programmers, the second re-entry address is likely to "clobber" the machine's memory of the original re-entry address.
    • 1999, Michael J. Wooldridge, Anand Rao, Foundations of Rational Agency, page 74:
      Inferences made in accordance with this reason are defeated by finding that the merged plan clobbers one of the causal-links in one of the constituent plans.
    • 2004, John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young, Unix for Dummies, page 314:
      The cp command does one thing as it clobbers a file; mv and ln do another.
    • 2007, Billy Hoffman, Bryan Sullivan, Ajax Security, unnumbered page:
      These functions collide, and we can see in Figure 7-1 that the debug() function for SexyWidgets clobbers the developer′s debug() function. The last function declared with the same name in the same scope will silently clobber the earlier function definition.
    • 2022, Luciano Ramalho, chapter 11, in Fluent Python, 2nd edition, O'Reilly, →ISBN:
      If you create your own mood instance attribute without being aware of the name clash, you will clobber the mood attribute used by the methods inherited from Dog.
Synonyms
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Derived terms
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Translations
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Noun

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clobber (uncountable)

  1. (slang) A thumping or beating.
    • 2014, Philippa Ballantine, Weather Child:
      He should have stepped back and given Hemi room to chat and see where the women[sic] was going, yet he found himself drawn over to them. His friend would probably give him a clobber later on for his stupidity […]
  2. A bash on say the head, typically with a tool or object rather than with fists.

Etymology 2

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British slang from 19th century of unknown origin, perhaps from Yiddish.[1]

Noun

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clobber (uncountable)

  1. (Australia, British, slang) Clothing; clothes.
  2. (British, slang) Equipment.

Etymology 3

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Of obscure origin, but compare clabber (“mud, wet clay”).

Noun

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clobber (uncountable)

  1. A paste used by shoemakers to hide the cracks in leather.

References

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  1. ^ “clobber n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present

Anagrams

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