Hum

How to spell hum

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hum

What does hum mean?

1. verbTo make a low, steady droning sound, or to sing a tune with the lips closed.
2. nounA low, continuous droning or murmuring sound.

Hum in a sentence

• verb

  The old refrigerator would hum quietly through the night.

• noun

  A faint hum came from the air conditioning unit overhead.

• verb

  She liked to hum along to the radio while cooking dinner.

• noun

  The steady hum of traffic drifted in through the open window.

Where does hum come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hum is an echoic, or imitative, word: it began as an attempt to copy with the human voice the very sound it names, the low continuous droning noise made by bees, machinery, or a closed-mouth singer. It appears in late Middle English around the 1300s, where forms like 'hummen' were used to describe murmuring or buzzing, and it belongs to the same instinctive sound-making impulse that produced 'hmm' and 'humdrum'. Because the meaning lives entirely in the sound, the spelling stayed short and plain, with no Latin or French ancestry behind it to complicate matters. Over time the word stretched beyond literal noise into the idea of lively, busy activity, as when a workshop or a town is said to be humming. There is also the informal sense of an unpleasant smell, common in British speech, which grew out of the notion of something being noticeably 'present'. Throughout its history the word has kept its single, compact syllable, making it one of the easier words in English to spell.

How the word is built

• hum (imitative root, echoing a low droning sound); no prefix or suffix