Pronounced: HUH-muck, noun
Notes: If you think this is just a misspelled “hammock”, you are right and wrong
Yesterday’s word
The word sorb means
- to take up and hold by absorption
- to take up and hold by adsorption
First usage
Our word came into English in the first decade of the 1900s
Background / Comments
If you think like me, when you saw the definition, you thought “what is adsorption?”. Most of us presumably know “absorption” – it’s what happens when you put a drop of water on a sponge. When we turn the ‘b’ around, we get “adsorption”, which is when a substance is merely deposited on the surface of another (think of a drop of water on a glass slide). Our word was created from absorb, which came from the Latin word absorbere, which is composed of ab- (away) and sorbere (to suck).
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 