Origin of Phrase 'sweating cobs'

[ianbearpark]

What is the origin of the phrase 'to sweat cobs'?

[M.T.Vessel]

I think the phrase may have originated from a chef when he was cooking corn on the cob because when you fry it it sweats.

[Big Man]

I believe that it means that you are a cob head and that you sweat a lot!!

[andy hughes]

I understood it to mean issuing large beads of perspiration, which resemble cobble stones.

[Quizmonster]

The word 'cob' has been used to mean anything rounded - eg a type of bread - since the 16th century. A cob horse, for example, is a short, stout breed. (It was even used as slang for 'testicle' at one time.) It's easy to see, therefore, how it came to suggest large 'beads' of sweat.

[MidlanderUK]

I didn't realise cob mean't anything round. In my local dialect, that is Nottingham in the UK, we call bread rolls/baps, cobs. Everyone else in the UK doesn't understand what you mean when you ask for one. :-)~

[TerryJ]

Cob is an old word meaning something round. It also was used to describe a spider - as in cobweb. My suggestion for the above phrase is that when one is sweating profusely the beads of sweat feel like a spider scuttling down one's face, or alternatively the feeling of walking into a spiders web.

[ianbearpark]

Are you kidding me Terry? why this?

[ew100]

A "cob" is a generic term for a type of (UK) native breed horse.

They were the common workhorse in Victorian Britain, pulling delivery carts, canal barges and so on. When they work, they sweat, so "sweating like a cob" means sweating like a workhorse. This form of the saying still gets used, certainly in Yorkshire.

It is but a short linguistic hop from that to "sweating cobs", so I would suggest that this is the most likely origin.