flub

1. 1.

   make a mess of, destroy or ruin

   “I botched the dinner and we had to eat out”

   “the pianist screwed up the difficult passage in the second movement”

   Synonymsbotchbodgebumblefumblebotch upmuffblowscrew upball upspoilmuck upbunglefluffbollix

   Broaderfail

Other forms of flub

plural

flubs·

past tense or participle

flubbed

present participle

flubbing

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about flub

What does flub mean?

flub means "an embarrassing mistake". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in flub?

flub has 1 syllable under the regular spelling rules, and is not divided further. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for flub?

Close synonyms include blunder, blooper, bloomer, bungle, pratfall. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is flub a common word?

flub is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.