Talk:mob

Role-playing games
Mob is also a slang word for any computer-steered character in role play games. Some say, it is an abbreviation of "Man Or Beast", others claim it origins from the word "MOBile object".


 * ✅ Equinox ◑ 15:49, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Tea room discussion
According to the Wikipedia article, there are a lot of senses missing. Probably, the etymology needs to be split up (from unruly crowd to criminal organization is an extra step). H. (talk) 20:44, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Gender agreement
mōbilis (vulgus), surely? Masculine singular? Koro Neil (talk) 09:53, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

us mob
The OED has "us mob", relating to the Australian Aboriginal sense. An example I found is below. Equinox ◑ 15:49, 21 September 2016 (UTC)


 * 1) * 1995, Lumu Nungurrayi, ‎Jordan Crugnale, Footprints Across Our Land: Short Stories by Senior Western Desert Women
 * My mother and other women used to go hunting, getting their own food, and us mob went to get our own too.


 * "us mob" sounds very reminiscent of Hindi "hum lōg" (lit., "we people", = "we") although I can't imagine why there would be any connection between the two. Mathglot (talk) 15:35, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Disputed definition
The sense of "to mob" as crowding around someone "often with hostility" is erroneous. This is not the primary sense of this word as it is understood by hundreds of millions of native English speakers. Rather, this is Euro-English, used first by a Swedish scholar(de) in the 1970s to refer to the specific anti-social phenomenon of group bullying and harassment. This sense was then picked up by other scholars, including somewhat later by native English scholars, and now is sufficiently widespread in academia to be notable as a secondary sense of the term. It is not, however, the first sense of the term as used by native speakers.

The principal meaning of the verb "to mob" is to crowd around, with neutral or positive rather than negative intent. For example, a search for "Beatles were mobbed" will turn up thousands of examples of crowding around with positive intent, and none that I can see with negative intent. It's this positive sense of joyous approval that native speakers are familiar with in the word "mobbing", such as in "He flew completely undetected through Soviet airspace and then guided his plane to a landing near the Kremlin in Red Square in Moscow. A crowd of onlookers mobbed the young man, many of whom sought his autograph.", or "Outside the courtroom, they hugged and mobbed the prosecutor 'for a job well done'". The negative sense is basically unknown in common parlance; for example, "[The] lynch mob mobbed [the victim]..." is unattested.

The negative, scholarly sense is attested now by reliable sources, and so should be covered, but it is clearly the secondary, and very recent sense, going back only a few decades, and is a sense which is entirely unknown to the 99.9% of native English speakers who do not read scholarly journals. The Wiktionary definition should account for that. Mathglot (talk) 09:29, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
 * First of all the definition says "sometimes with hostility", not "often with hostility". Second, this is Wiktionary, where we take a descriptive approach based on usage, not Wikipedia, which takes a prescriptive approach based on authoritative/reliable sources. If English speakers use and understand the word a certain way, it's not "erroneous"- our only "reliable source" for English is usage (see our Criteria for inclusion). Usage with a negative connotation isn't common, but it exists. Third, there's a reason you had to improvise to tag the entry the way it's done at Wikipedia: we don't do things that way here. We have over 5 million entries, many of which are rarely or never visited by editors. If you want to dispute something about the entry, you tag it with the appropriate template and discuss it on the appropriate discussion forum: if you just want to discuss something about the entry, you use rft and post an item at the Tea room. If you want to remove a term or a sense because of usage-related concerns, you use rfv or rfv-sense and post at Requests for verification. If you think a term or a sense should be removed based on something else in WT:CFI, use rfd or rfd-sense and post at Requests for deletion. There's also rfm/ Requests for moves, mergers and splits, which might be a good idea here since the hostile behavior might best be split off into a separate sense, with possibly a subsense for its use in animal behavior to refer to birds or other animals surrounding predators in large numbers to drive them away. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:05, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This is an old discussion but Lexico has the definition "crowd around (someone) in an unruly and excitable way in order to admire or attack them." Enervation (talk) 07:00, 11 September 2020 (UTC)

Informal use, and animals
I'm not familiar with editing Wiktionary and don't have the time to learn at the moment, so I am hoping that someone else will pick up my points and think about adding to this entry.
 * Firstly, informal use, as attested to in the Oxford, as in "our usual gang" kind of sense. My 1997 Macquarie Dictionary ("Australia's National Dictionary") gives, as its first definition: 1. a. a large number, especially of people: "there was a mob of people in the streets to see the procession". b. A group of people, as friends, not necessarily large: "we'll invite the mob over...".... then goes on to 11 other usages (including "a big mob" for a large number and "mobs of..." for "loads of").
 * Secondly, the Australian usage relating to animals. I'm not sure of the origin of this usage, but mob of kangaroos is more common than mob of emus (see Google results), and Macquarie doesn't mention emus in their list, but does include kangaroos, cattle and sheep... This list shows an 1894 usage of "mob of sheep", so I wonder if it the early settlers borrowed it from the Aboriginal Australian usage? - But this is pure speculation. The 1997 Macquarie gives the second usage as "2. a collection of animals: "a mob of sheep". So it seems to me as if usages no. 2 and no. 7 in the Wiktionary list should be merged.

Also wondering if a less pejorative meaning should be separated from the first one given here? See Merriam-Webster - mobs of shoppers, or fans. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:31, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Etymology for mob cap sense
We link it to, a slattern (which gives no ety at present). Chambers 1908 has: "Old Dutch mop; mod. Dutch mopmuts, a woman's nightcap; cf. Scotch mutch." Equinox ◑ 01:23, 2 April 2023 (UTC)