Lam

How to spell lam

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lam

What does lam mean?

1. nounA hurried escape or period of hiding, especially to avoid arrest, used in the phrase 'on the lam'.

Lam in a sentence

• The suspect went on the lam for nearly six months before being caught.

• After the robbery the gang stayed on the lam across three states.

Where does lam come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This short, slangy word traces back to the Old Norse verb lemja, meaning 'to beat' or 'to thrash', which is also the source of the English word 'lame' (originally describing someone beaten or crippled). In sixteenth-century English 'lam' settled in as a verb meaning to strike or beat hard, and that thrashing sense survives in regional and old-fashioned speech. The escape sense, as in the phrase 'on the lam', emerged in American underworld slang around the turn of the twentieth century, probably from the idea of 'beating it' or 'beating a hasty retreat', the same logic that lets us say someone 'legged it'. The spelling is genuinely tricky because it is a perfect homophone of 'lamb', the young sheep, whose silent 'b' is a fossil of older English spelling. Keeping 'lam' to three letters with no trailing 'b' is the whole spelling battle here.

How the word is built

• lam (single root, from Old Norse lemja: to beat, thrash)

Words that sound like lam

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• lamb: A young sheep, or the meat from one.