dumbbell

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a short bar with a weight at each end, held in one hand for exercise

   She lifted a ten-kilogram dumbbell during each repetition.

2. 2
   noun

   informal, a foolish or unintelligent person

   I felt like a dumbbell after locking my keys inside the car.

From dumb ("silent") + bell. Early exercise machines imitated the weighted motion of ringing a church bell but had no clapper and made no sound; the name later passed to handheld weights. The insulting sense compares a person to a supposedly witless object.

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