Elm

How to spell elm

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce elm

What does elm mean?

1. nounA tall deciduous tree with rough, serrated leaves and durable timber, common in temperate regions.

Elm in a sentence

• A mature elm shaded the whole back garden in summer.

• The council planted a young elm to replace the one lost to disease.

Where does elm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Elm is a genuinely old native word, descending from the Old English elm, the name for the tall deciduous tree with rough, doubly toothed leaves. It belongs to a wide Germanic and broader Indo-European family: closely related forms appear in Old Norse almr, Old High German elm, and Latin ulmus, all naming the same kind of tree, which suggests the word reaches far back into the common ancestry of these languages. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, never picking up the silent letters or French overlays that trouble many English words. The only mild trap is the final consonant cluster lm, where the l can feel almost swallowed in speech yet must still be written. In modern times the word carries a sad cultural echo because of Dutch elm disease, the fungal infection that destroyed vast numbers of these trees across Britain and North America in the twentieth century.

How the word is built

• elm (a single Old English root naming the tree; no prefix or suffix)