Jammed

How to spell jammed

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jammed

What does jammed mean?

1. verbBecame stuck fast or stopped working because a part was wedged and could not move.
2. verbFilled or crammed so full that there was barely any space left.

Jammed in a sentence

• The office printer jammed halfway through the report.

• The commuters jammed themselves into the last carriage.

• The back door jammed shut after the wood swelled in the rain.

• She jammed the suitcase with everything she could fit.

Where does jammed come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This is the past tense of the verb 'jam', a word whose origin is genuinely uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge on it. It first appears in English in the early 1700s with the sense of pressing or squeezing things tightly together, and the leading theory is that it is imitative, an echoic word coined to suggest the sudden crushing or wedging action it describes. The sticky fruit preserve called 'jam' is recorded slightly later and is usually traced to the same verb, the idea being fruit crushed or squeezed into a thick mass. The doubled 'm' that appears in 'jammed' follows the regular English rule for short single-syllable words ending in a single vowel plus consonant: the final consonant doubles before a suffix beginning with a vowel, just as in 'planned' and 'stopped'. That doubling is the main spelling trap, since the base word 'jam' has only one 'm'.

How the word is built

• jam (to press, wedge, or block)
• -m- (doubled consonant before the suffix)
• -ed (past tense / past participle)