Foam

How to spell foam

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce foam

What does foam mean?

1. nounA mass of small bubbles formed on or in liquid, or a light spongy material made to resemble it.
2. verbTo produce or form a mass of bubbles.

Foam in a sentence

• noun

  The barista poured a thick layer of foam on the latte.

• verb

  The cleaning product will foam as soon as it touches water.

• noun

  The mattress was made from a dense memory foam.

• verb

  Hot milk tends to foam when you steam it for coffee.

Where does foam come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Foam descends from the Old English word fām, which meant froth or the mass of small bubbles that gathers on a liquid. It belongs to a wider Germanic family and is related to the Old High German feim, with deeper roots in an ancient Indo-European word for froth that also gave Latin its spuma, meaning foam or scum. The word has stayed remarkably stable in both sound and sense across more than a thousand years, always describing the light, bubbly layer that forms on beer, the sea, or soapy water. The spelling settled on the digraph 'oa' to capture the long vowel, the same pattern seen in 'soap' and 'loam'. In the twentieth century the noun broadened to cover manufactured spongy materials such as foam rubber and foam insulation.

How the word is built

• foam (single root from Old English fām: froth, bubbles); no prefix or suffix