means A stretchy, elastic material—originally made from the milky sap of certain tropical trees, now often synthetic—used in everything from tires to erasers to bands.

from The name comes from a humble desk task: in 1770 the chemist Joseph Priestley noted that the substance could 'rub' out pencil marks, so people called it 'India rubber'—rubber for the rubbing, India because it came from the Indies trade. The material itself the Europeans met later than the Mesoamericans, who'd been bouncing balls of it for millennia; their word gave us 'caoutchouc,' from an Amerindian term meaning roughly 'weeping wood,' for the tree that cries latex when cut.