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A dumbbell is a weight training equipment usually consisting of a short rod with weights - usually plates and sometimes spheres - affixed on either end. The rod is often engraved with a cross-hatch knurl to improve grip. Dumbbells can either be used individually or in pairs.
Dumbbells are available in a variety of designs with some offering only one fixed weight per dumbbell, others allowing the user to add and remove plates from either end, and even more advance variants offering selectors to adjust weights quickly and easily.
The word dumb-bell was used to represent a device similar to that used to ring church bells, albeit, without the bell and hence, dumb. One of the earliest known versions of the dumbbell known as the halteres, was used in ancient Greece.
