a. [f. TUB sb. + -Y.] Resembling or suggesting a tub.
1. Tub-shaped, tub-like; of rounded outline, and stout or broad in proportion to the length; of a person, corpulent.
1835. Anster, trans. Faustus, II. v. (1887), 269. Come, short-horned, thick Devils, tubby, stubby.
1859. Sala, Tw. round Clock (1861), 14. They are mostly square and squat in rigging, and somewhat tubby in build.
1885. Pall Mall G., 9 June, 2/2. In 1690 … he [Stradivarius] began to improve his model, bringing it flatter, the great secret of the true violin as opposed to the old tubby model.
1891. Kipling, Plain Tales fr. Hills, vii. 54. Fat Captains and tubby Majors.
1905. Westm. Gaz., 21 March, 4/2. Driving a tubby [motor] car.
2. Sounding like a tub when struck; dull or wooden in sound. (Said of stringed instruments.)
1806–7. J. Beresford, Miseries Hum. Life (ed. 3), XVI. 90. The dead, lumpish, tubby tones of the fourth and filth strings of the guittar.
1883. Haweis, My Musical Life (1884), I. 95. He [the violin] goes ‘tubby’ (a term used to express a dull vibration).
