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What's the best word (or words) to describe rubber's 'gripping' property that is the opposite of oil's slipperiness?

It's not 'rough', since rubber grips without necessarily being rough.

EmmaV
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    Tacky / sticky / adhesive? – Dan Bron Nov 16 '14 at 23:29
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    Supple, elastic, pliable, springy, stretchy... – WS2 Nov 16 '14 at 23:40
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    rubbery – pazzo Nov 17 '14 at 00:12
  • These words aren't really related to high friction, which is the property of rubber I have in mind. – EmmaV Nov 17 '14 at 00:22
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    Rubbery would have been a valid answer if my question were 'Oil is oily...'. – EmmaV Nov 17 '14 at 00:31
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    Certainly that would be a perfect analogue; but rubbery is the only common English word that refers to (some of) the properties of rubber. As for grippiness, that has to do with how the rubber's been processed; some are slippery, some are sticky. – John Lawler Nov 17 '14 at 00:34
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    Rubber is slippery when wet. – ermanen Nov 17 '14 at 01:01
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    Oil is slippery; rubber is ... not? – Beta Nov 17 '14 at 03:52
  • Considering @jlovegren's objection that oils is a fluid and makes surfaces slippery because it can shear you can compare rubber to teflon instead which could also be considered slippery. What you are interested in is the amount of friction, independent of the underlying physical mechanisms. Nice question. Btw, "has grip" feels more natural to my (non-native) ears than the uncommon "grippy". – Peter - Reinstate Monica Nov 17 '14 at 12:05
  • I vote a new word be created: grippery. – Adam Davis Nov 17 '14 at 12:40
  • @ermanen Not always, the bottoms of shoes can be grippy when wet – Izkata Nov 17 '14 at 17:40
  • @Izkata: It was kind of humor but whatever. It depends on other factors but it is generally true. – ermanen Nov 17 '14 at 18:07
  • ...rubber is rubbish ;) – Tobias Kienzler Nov 18 '14 at 09:30
  • You might want to change the subject to "Teflon is slippery, rubber is ____", as many people have pointed out that oil is a facilitator of slipperyness but is not slippery by itself. – Mark Lakata Nov 18 '14 at 17:41
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    @MarkLakata, but "teflon" doesn't have quite the same cadence as the original: roses are red, violets are blue, oil is slippery, rubber grips true. – pilcrow Nov 18 '14 at 18:21
  • In my experience, rock climbers universally refer to climbing slippers as being made of "sticky rubber." As a physicist, I would refer to rubber as "high-friction." –  Nov 18 '14 at 20:23
  • Rubber with oil on it is very slippery. Also you used the best word right on your question... grippy – KnightHawk Nov 18 '14 at 23:22
  • @Joseph Neathawk: Rubber with oil on it is slippery, but rubber is inherently grippy nonetheless. Also, I used the word gripping in the question; not grippy. – EmmaV Nov 19 '14 at 16:20

8 Answers8

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The "obvious" answer is grippy — the ability to grip a surface well. It is less commonly used than slippery, but it is a proper word.

200_success
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As has been mentioned in comments, "sticky"or "adhesive" might fit. But the truth is rubber isn't naturally sticky or adhesive. It does have a high "coefficient of friction" though. That's why it isn't slippery. In non-technical terms, we can say rubber is nonslippery or skid-resistant.

Centaurus
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The word tacky is used when describing the 'grippiness' of golf grips (which are, as it happens, made of rubber), especially when it comes to the 'stickiness' of the rubber compound, as opposed to the roughness of the surface.

Fingolfin
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The word slippery implies very little friction. You want a word that implies a lot of friction, which creates a "gripping" sensation.

To that effect, I couldn't find any simple, commonly used words. Frictive is one, which literally means "friction-y". CarSmack suggested "rubbery", but "rubber is rubbery" seems redundant.

Joe Z.
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    Are frictive, frictional and frictious proper words? They seem not to be found anywhere other than wiktionary.org. – EmmaV Nov 17 '14 at 00:29
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    Frictional is definitely a word (it's used in physics, e.g. a frictional force); frictive I've never heard before either. – Joe Z. Nov 17 '14 at 01:35
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    @JoeZ. Both frictive and frictional are used in physics. Frictive is just less used than frictional – Jim Nov 17 '14 at 15:55
  • @JoeZ.- I like your answer. Seems to be much more original and descriptive than the other answers I have read. Certainly worthy of a higher score and so I add my own. – Duane T. Bentz Nov 19 '14 at 14:06
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Comments thusfar (including the OP's) seem to confuse friction with rheology. A slippery substance is one with low viscosity, not a low coefficient of friction. A coating of oil makes surfaces slippery because the oil deforms easily and permanently under small shear (i.e., sliding) stress. Rubber deforms only slightly, then returns to its original shape, so a rubber coating does not makes surfaces slippery. At the molecular level, both rubber and oil cling to many types of surfaces on contact, but the difference in slipperiness has to do with the way that the two substances flow.

You can say that oil is plastic (deforms permanently), while rubber is elastic (restores to original shape). Alternately you can say that rubber is viscous (deforms only slightly), while oil is slippery (shears easily). A less technical term for rubber would be skid- or slip-resistant.

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    I was refering to friction. I don't think viscosity and plasticity are relevant. Can a solid have viscosity? – EmmaV Nov 17 '14 at 00:50
  • A solid can have resistance to shear, and that behaves the same way as viscosity. – Sean Nov 17 '14 at 03:10
  • Elastic materials like rubbers or thermoplastic elastomers are characterized by their durometer, which is a measure of hardness (as measured by the amount of penetration into the surface of a given probe with a given force). – Spehro Pefhany Nov 17 '14 at 03:52
  • We have words to describe opposite subjective sensations for many things; these words need not have any, let alone a 1:1, relationship to the words that describe the underlying physical processes. Compare "hot" and "cold": the words that describe what's really going on in the underlying physics have zero relevance to the subjective sensations we use "hot" and "cold" to describe. Ditto with oil and slipperiness: the language describes "lay" experience, which predates and has zero concern for the "real" situation at the molecular level. – SevenSidedDie Nov 18 '14 at 05:01
  • Saying that oil is plastic and rubber is something else would be prone to misinterpretation though because rubber is actually plastic while oil is not (though crude oil/petroleum are used to make plastics). – Lie Ryan Nov 18 '14 at 13:57
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    @LieRyan To try to clear up that confusion: 'plastic' has multiple, albeit related, senses salient to this context: as an adjective for a permanently deformable substance and as a noun for a formable polymer. Thus, 'oil is plastic' and 'rubber is plastic' are both true statements — for differing senses of 'plastic'. The use of petroleum as a feedstock for polymer production just compounds the confusion. – Jeffrey Hantin Nov 18 '14 at 22:47
  • @SevenSidedDie I think that learning has to inform our vocabulary to some extent. if we are talking about a material that is man-made and specially engineered, we should not be surprised if engineers' terminology enters lay speech. the germ theory of disease, for example, at one point had no relevance to lay speech, but now it does (because language users learned and incorporated the knowledge into their vocabulary). –  Nov 19 '14 at 00:25
  • Describing sensations via words for unseen molecular events that contradict the sensations will never happen. Germ theory is incomparable because it replaced another unseen—miasma theory—and didn't have to compete with direct experiential description words. (Aside, neither oil nor rubber are man-made.) – SevenSidedDie Nov 19 '14 at 00:43
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Unslippery is certainly a possibility, but I don't like it.

Commercial products such as deck paints tend to use terms such as "non-slip" and "slip-resistant".

Spehro Pefhany
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The first word that comes to mind without trying too hard is chafing. Perhaps you could also try abrasive. While they are not perfect matches for rubber to describe the equivalent of slippery to oil, it is a close match.

dbone
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Rubber is 'tacky'. I like the word tacky. It's kind of tacky like blue tack or the soles of your 'tekkies' (slang word for running shoes in Afrikaans)...

McGafter
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