Beam

How to spell beam

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beam

What does beam mean?

1. nounA long, sturdy length of timber or metal used to support a structure.
2. nounA ray or directed shaft of light or radiation.
3. verbTo smile with obvious joy or pride.
4. verbTo send out a signal, broadcast, or directed energy.

Beam in a sentence

• noun

  A steel beam runs the length of the ceiling to carry the load.

• noun

  The torch sent a narrow beam across the dark cellar.

• verb

  New parents tend to beam at every photograph of their baby.

• verb

  The satellite can beam the broadcast to millions of homes at once.

• noun

  The builders rested the floor joists on a single oak beam.

• noun

  A beam of sunlight fell across the kitchen table each morning.

Where does beam come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word that comes from the Old English bēam, which originally meant a living tree or a large piece of wood cut from one. You can still see that older sense preserved in tree names such as hornbeam and whitebeam. The word is closely related to the modern German Baum, which still simply means tree, so the family connection is easy to spot. From the idea of a long, straight piece of timber the meaning widened to the structural beams that hold up buildings, and then, by a poetic leap, to a slender shaft of light, as though the light were a straight wooden pole stretching across a room. The verb sense of beaming with happiness grew from the picture of a face that seems to give off light, and the broadcasting sense (to beam a signal) is a modern technical extension of the same ray-of-light idea.

How the word is built

• beam (single Old English root meaning tree, then timber and ray); no affixes