Broom

How to spell broom

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce broom

What does broom mean?

1. nounA long-handled brush used for sweeping floors and other surfaces.
2. nounA wild shrub with slender green stems and bright yellow flowers, often found on heaths and roadsides.

Broom in a sentence

• She grabbed a broom and swept the kitchen floor.

• Clumps of yellow broom flowered along the hillside in spring.

• The broom leaned against the wall beside the dustpan.

• The gardener planted broom for its hardy golden blooms.

Where does broom come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Broom comes straight from the Old English word brom, which named a wild, yellow-flowered shrub that grew on heaths and waste ground. The plant's tough, springy twigs were tied into bundles and used for sweeping floors, so the name of the bush gradually came to mean the sweeping tool itself, and that practical, household sense is now the everyday one. The word has solid Germanic roots and is closely related to 'bramble', a thorny shrub, and to the Dutch and German words for similar plants. The double 'o' spelling settled in over time and simply marks the long 'oo' vowel, while the original plant name survives largely in gardening and in place names. So the modern broom in the cupboard is named after a bush, a tidy reminder that the spelling 'oo' belongs to both meanings.

How the word is built

• broom (from Old English brom, the shrubby plant whose twigs were bound to make sweeping brushes)