limb

Etymology 1

From Middle English lyme, lim, from Old English lim (“limb, branch”), from Proto-West Germanic *limu, from Proto-Germanic *limuz (“branch, limb”). Cognate with Old Norse limr (“limb”). The spelling with the silent unetymological -b first arose in the late 1500s. Compare crumb and climb.

noun

1. A major appendage of human or animal, used for locomotion (such as an arm, leg or wing).
2. A branch of a tree.
3. (archery) The part of the bow, from the handle to the tip.
4. An elementary piece of the mechanism of a lock.
5. A thing or person regarded as a part or member of, or attachment to, something else.
6. Short for limb of Satan (“a wicked or mischievous child”).

verb

1. (transitive) To remove the limbs from (an animal or tree).
   They limbed the felled trees before cutting them into logs.
2. (transitive) To supply with limbs.
   Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him. 1859, Henry D. Thoreau, Walden

Etymology 2

From Latin limbus (“border”).

noun

1. (astronomy) The apparent visual edge of a celestial body.
   the solar limb
   At 4h 57m 9s by my chronometer, (see Schedule B,) I observed with my telescope a small black speck on the preceding limb of the sun's disk, at the precise point to which I had been for some minutes directing my attention. 1870, United States Naval Observatory, Reports on Observations of the Total Eclipse of the Sun, August, 7, 1869, page 174
   Chandrasekhar (1946a, b) predicted that the limb of a star will be polarized, because photons scattered at the limb and toward the observer experience a scattering angle of Θ ≈ 90°. 2015, Ludmilla Kolokolova, James Hough, Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd, Polarimetry of Stars and Planetary Systems, page 449
2. (on a measuring instrument) The graduated edge of a circle or arc.
3. (botany) The border or upper spreading part of a monopetalous corolla, or of a petal or sepal; blade.
   The corolla limb of the moonvine Calonyction aculeatum is normally undivided. 1945, “A new form of the moonvine Calonyction aculeatum with divided corolla limb, and length-of-day behavior and flowering of the common form”, in Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, volume 35, number 2