hub [E16th] Although hub is recorded from the early 16th century, it did not appear in any dictionary until the 19th. It seems to have been an English dialect term that first meant ‘hob’ (a variant spelling recorded from the late 16th century), which before the days of modern cookers was a surface behind or beside a fireplace used for heating pans, originally made of piled up clay. The sense ‘the central part of a wheel’ dates from the mid 17th.