You searched for: “plumber
plumber (s), plumbers (pl) (noun forms)
1. People who install and repair the piping and fixtures used in the distribution (in and out) of water in buildings.
2. Someone who installs and repairs pipes and plumbing; originally, simply a "worker in lead"; but eventually, since water pipes were once made of lead, a "pipe-layer".

The Romans used lead pipes, and the word plumber comes from the Latin word plumbum, "lead".

There is no Latin, or even Indo-European, etymology for plumbum but it bears a distant similarity to the Greek word for lead, the standard form of which, molubdos, gives us the name of a chemical element in the Periodic Table, molybdenum. Two non-standard forms, molibos and especially bolimos, are even more similar to Latin.

This entry is located in the following unit: plumb-, plumbo-, plumbi- + (page 1)