Dam

How to spell dam

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dam

What does dam mean?

1. nounA barrier built across a river or stream to hold back water and raise its level.
2. verbTo block or hold back a flow of water with a barrier.
3. nounThe female parent of an animal, especially a horse, dog, or other livestock.

Dam in a sentence

• noun

  Engineers inspected the concrete dam for cracks before the spring melt.

• verb

  The council plans to dam the river to create a new lake.

• noun

  The foal stayed close to its dam in the paddock.

• noun

  The reservoir behind the dam supplies water to the whole valley.

• verb

  Fallen logs began to dam the stream and flood the meadow.

• noun

  The breeder recorded both the sire and the dam of every puppy.

Where does dam come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

In its main sense, dam comes from a Germanic root shared across the North Sea languages, appearing as dam in Middle Dutch and Middle Low German and meaning a bank or barrier built to hold back water. It traces back to Proto-Germanic *dammaz, the name for an earthwork raised across a stream or marsh. English took it up in the 1300s, very likely reinforced by the busy trade and drainage engineering of the Low Countries, where dam-building was a way of life; that influence survives in place names such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The unrelated sense of dam meaning the mother of an animal is actually a worn-down form of dame, which came through Old French from the Latin domina, meaning 'mistress' or 'lady'. The spelling stays usefully short and blunt, but it shares its sound exactly with damn, whose silent n is the real trap to remember.

How the word is built

• dam (a single Germanic root meaning a barrier holding back water); no prefix or suffix