glob

Meanings

Noun

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

Verb

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

Origin

• Possibly a or a . 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.