Meaning & use
TB
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Meanings
abbreviationuncountablemedical
Short for tuberculosis, a serious infectious disease that mostly affects the lungs.
Grammar: Uncountable and no article: she has TB.
Patterns
- have TB
- a TB test
Doctors tested him for TB after the long cough.
TB is treated with a course of antibiotics.
The vaccine protects children against TB.
abbreviationcountablecomputing
Short for terabyte, a unit of digital storage equal to about a thousand gigabytes.
Grammar: Takes a number: a 2 TB drive.
Patterns
- a 2 TB drive
- TB of storage
I bought a 4 TB external drive for my photos.
The server has 10 TB of storage.
The movie library takes up nearly a TB.
Common combinations
- TB test
- The nurse gave her a TB test.
- TB vaccine
- The TB vaccine is offered in many countries.
- catch TB
- He caught TB while traveling.
- 1 TB hard drive
- A 1 TB hard drive was enough.
Synonyms and how they differ
- tuberculosis
- Tuberculosis is the full medical name, while TB is the everyday short form.
- consumption
- Consumption is an old-fashioned name for the disease that you meet in older books.
- terabyte
- Terabyte is the full word for the storage sense, used more in formal technical writing.
Word family
- tuberculosis noun
- the infectious lung disease
- tubercular adjective
- relating to tuberculosis
- terabyte noun
- unit of data storage
- MB abbreviation
- megabyte, a much smaller unit
Commonly confused: TB or TB vs TV? TB or tb vs Tb?
TB vs TB vs TV
TB is tuberculosis or terabyte, while TV is television; they look similar in some fonts.
TB vs tb vs Tb
A capital B means bytes and a lowercase b means bits, so Tb is terabit.
Practice
In 'The patient was tested for TB', TB stands for ___.
Choose one answer.
In a medical context TB is tuberculosis. Terabyte fits only computer storage, and the others are not abbreviated this way.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “TB”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.