Ham

How to spell ham

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ham

What does ham mean?

1. nounMeat from the cured or smoked thigh of a pig.
2. nounA performer who overacts or shows off in an exaggerated way.
3. nounAn amateur radio enthusiast who operates a licensed station as a hobby.

Ham in a sentence

• She sliced the ham thinly for the sandwiches.

• The old actor was a shameless ham, mugging at every camera.

• As a licensed ham, she chatted with operators on three continents.

• The deli sells smoked ham by the pound.

• As a born ham, he turned a simple toast into a five-minute routine.

• Every ham in the club had to pass a technical exam first.

Where does ham come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English hamm, which did not originally mean the food at all but rather the hollow or bend behind the knee, and by extension the back of the thigh. This was a native Germanic word, related to forms in Old Frisian and Old High German that described the crook of the leg. Because the cured meat we now call ham is taken from the hind leg and thigh of a pig, the name of the body part naturally transferred to the cut of meat, a sense well established by the 1600s. The much later and quite separate sense of a performer who overacts is American slang from the late 1800s, probably shortened from 'hamfatter', a low-grade minstrel actor, and from this grew the verb meaning to overact. The amateur radio sense, also American, likewise grew from 'ham' used in a slightly mocking way for an unskilled operator, though that twist of meaning is less certainly traced.

How the word is built

• ham (single root; Old English hamm, the hollow behind the knee)