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[15] Ultimately, curb and curve are the same word. Latin curvāre ‘bend’ passed into Old French as courber, which Middle English borrowed as courbe ‘bend’. This seems to have formed the basis of a noun courbe or curb, which was originally used for a strap to restrain a horse, the underlying meaning perhaps being that pulling on the strap ‘bent’ the horse’s neck, thereby restraining it. The sense ‘enclosing framework’ began to emerge in the early 16th century, perhaps mainly through the influence of the French noun courbe, which meant ‘curved piece of timber, iron, etc used in building’. Its chief modern descendant is ‘pavement edge’, a 19th-century development, which has generally been spelled kerb in British English.
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