the.com/toothbrush
the most-used tool nobody respects, scrubbing the dirtiest part of your body twice daily
means A small handheld brush with bristles on one end, used with toothpaste to clean the teeth and gums.
from A plain compound of "tooth" and "brush," both solidly English — "tooth" from Old English tōþ (a cousin of Latin dens and Greek odous, all from a deep Indo-European root for the biting thing in your mouth), and "brush" from Old French broce, a bundle of twigs or bristles. The bristled object came before the word: people scrubbed their teeth with chew-sticks and frayed twigs for ages, but the proper bristle-on-a-handle design is often credited to China, and the English word "toothbrush" is recorded from around the turn of the 17th century — the moment the contraption finally earned a name as literal as it is unloved.
- Survey says
- Voted item Americans couldn't live without, beating cars
- Slow adopter
- Mass-produced bristle version arrived only around 1780
- Prison craft
- Sharpened into shivs, the most infamous improvised weapon
- Bacteria hotel
- One holds millions of microbes between brushings
- Toilet plume
- Open storage near toilets coats it in fecal mist
oral-b io series — electric toothbrush launched by braun in 2021, became best-selling premium electric toothbrush globally
sonicare diamondclean — philips sonic toothbrush released in 2011, uses 62,000 brush strokes per minute
miswak — natural toothbrush made from salvadora persica twigs, used for 7,000+ years across middle east and africa