glob

Meaning

Noun

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

Verb

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

Synonyms

clod

chunk

ball

clump

lump

blob

nugget

drip

drop

raindrop

clot

Pronounced as (IPA)

/ɡlɑb/

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 programming sense, originates from the early (c. 1970) Unix command glob; short for global.
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.