Gum

How to spell gum

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gum

What does gum mean?

1. nounA sticky substance, especially a sweetened preparation kept in the mouth for chewing or a natural resin used as an adhesive.
2. nounThe firm pink tissue that surrounds the base of the teeth.
3. verbTo clog, stick together, or smear with a sticky substance.

Gum in a sentence

• noun

  She offered him a stick of gum before the long flight.

• noun

  The dentist warned that brushing too hard can damage the gum.

• verb

  Too much glue will gum the gears and stop the machine.

• noun

  A wad of gum was stuck under the cafe table.

• noun

  A sore patch on his gum made it painful to eat.

• verb

  Dried paint can gum the hinges shut over time.

Where does gum come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The everyday word for a sticky plant substance arrived in English in the 1300s from the Old French gomme, which came from the Late Latin gumma and the earlier Latin gummi. Latin had in turn taken it from the Greek kommi, and the Greeks are thought to have borrowed it from ancient Egyptian, where a word like qemai named the resin tapped from acacia and similar trees. So the chewable, adhesive sense traces a long path from the Nile through Greece and Rome into French and finally English. There is also a completely separate native word: the gum that holds your teeth, which descends from the Old English goma, a Germanic word meaning the palate or inside of the mouth. These two words have nothing to do with each other historically and simply collapsed into the same three letters, which is why a single short spelling carries such different meanings.

How the word is built

• gum (single root; the plant-resin word from Latin gummi, the mouth-tissue word from Old English goma)