TB
Abbreviation with 7 meanings
| Stands for | Tuberculosis |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 7 |
| Categories | Medical, Units & Measurements, Business & Finance, Sports, Science & Engineering |
| Also written | Tb |
TB has seven meanings. The most common are Tuberculosis (infectious disease) and Terabyte (data unit); it can also stand for Terabit, Trial balance, Tiebreak, Total bases and Terbium.
Meanings of TB at a glance
| # | TB stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tuberculosis | Medical › Infectious Disease |
| 2 | Terabyte | Units & Measurements › Data Unit |
| 3 | Terabit | Units & Measurements › Data Unit |
| 4 | Trial balance | Business & Finance › Accounting |
| 5 | Tiebreak | Sports › Other Sports |
| 6 | Total bases | Sports › Baseball |
| 7 | Terbium | Science & Engineering › Chemical Element |
1. Tuberculosis
Medical · Infectious Disease Abbreviations
Infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis that spreads through the air and usually affects the lungs, causing chronic cough, fever, night sweats and weight loss. It is curable with several months of combination antibiotics but remains one of the world's deadliest infections, with over a million deaths a year.
Example: Cavitary right upper lobe lesion, sputum AFB smear positive; airborne isolation and RIPE therapy for TB.
Robert Koch identified the bacterium in 1882, announced on March 24, now World TB Day. The standard regimen uses rifampin, isoniazid, pyrazinamide and ethambutol (RIPE) for two months, then two drugs for four more. In 2023 TB again became the world's leading single infectious cause of death after COVID-19 declined. Historically called consumption or phthisis.
2. Terabyte
Units & Measurements · Data Unit Abbreviations
One trillion bytes in the decimal sense, the standard unit for hard drives, SSDs, backup plans and large data sets. A 1 TB drive holds roughly 250,000 smartphone photos.
Example: The laptop ships with a 1 TB NVMe SSD and 32 GB of memory.
Operating systems that count in binary show a 1 TB drive as about 931 GB (0.909 TiB), a 9 percent gap that grows with each prefix step. Hard drives first reached 1 TB in 2007 with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000; consumer drives now exceed 20 TB. Cloud storage plans are commonly sold in 1 TB and 2 TB tiers.
3. Terabit (Tb)
Units & Measurements · Data Unit Abbreviations
One trillion bits, the scale of backbone network capacity, submarine cables and data-center switching. Modern transatlantic fiber cables carry hundreds of terabits per second in total.
Example: The subsea cable is designed for 250 Tb/s across its fiber pairs.
Switch chips built for AI clusters now handle more than 50 Tb/s each. Like other bit units, Tb takes a lowercase b; TB with a capital B means terabytes. Internet exchange points report their peak traffic in terabits per second.
4. Trial balance
Business & Finance · Accounting Abbreviations
Listing of all general ledger accounts and their debit or credit balances at a point in time, used to check that total debits equal total credits before financial statements are prepared. Accountants work from an unadjusted TB, post adjustments and then produce an adjusted TB.
Example: Send me the adjusted TB by Wednesday so I can start drafting the year-end accounts.
A trial balance that balances does not prove the books are correct: posting to the wrong account or omitting a transaction entirely leaves the totals equal. Auditors usually begin fieldwork with the client's TB. In other contexts TB means tuberculosis or terabyte.
5. Tiebreak
Sports · Other Sports Abbreviations
Tennis game played to decide a set at six games all, won by the first player to reach seven points with a two-point margin. Scores show it in parentheses, as in 7-6 (5).
Example: She won the first set 7-6 (TB 7-4) and broke early in the second.
Introduced at the 1970 US Open by James Van Alen. Since 2022 all four Grand Slams use a 10-point tiebreak at 6-6 in the final set. Before that, Wimbledon allowed endless final sets: John Isner beat Nicolas Mahut 70-68 in the fifth in 2010.
6. Total bases
Sports · Baseball Abbreviations
Bases gained through hits: one per single, two per double, three per triple and four per home run. Dividing total bases by at-bats gives slugging percentage.
Example: Four hits including two homers gave him 12 TB, a franchise record.
Hank Aaron holds the career record with 6,856 total bases, and Babe Ruth's 457 in 1921 is the single-season mark. Shawn Green's 19 total bases in one game in 2002 remains the record. Sportsbooks offer TB over/under props.
7. Terbium (Tb)
Science & Engineering · Chemical Element Abbreviations
A strong green glow in fluorescent-lamp and display phosphors comes from terbium (atomic number 65). Combined with dysprosium and iron in the alloy Terfenol-D, it changes shape in a magnetic field, a property used in sonar transducers and precision actuators; it also improves the heat resistance of magnets.
Example: Green phosphor in the trichromatic lamp is a Tb-activated aluminate.
Carl Gustaf Mosander identified terbium in 1843 as an impurity in yttria; it is one of four elements named after the Swedish village of Ytterby. The names terbium and erbium were confusingly swapped in the decades after their discovery. The "Ter" in Terfenol-D stands for terbium, "fe" for iron and "NOL" for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory.
Related abbreviations
More infectious disease abbreviations
- STD – Sexually transmitted disease
- STEC – Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli
- STI – Sexually transmitted infection
- SVR – Sustained virologic response
- Td – Tetanus and diphtheria toxoids vaccine
- Tdap – Tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis vaccine
- TSS – Toxic shock syndrome
- U=U – Undetectable equals untransmittable
See all 92 infectious disease abbreviations →
More data unit abbreviations
- PiB – Pebibyte
- PPI – Pixels per inch
- PPM – Pages per minute
- px – Pixel
- Tbps – Terabits per second
- TBW – Terabytes written
- TFLOPS – Teraflops
- TiB – Tebibyte
See all 36 data unit abbreviations →
This entry is for general education and is not medical advice. Abbreviation use varies between institutions; always confirm in context.