Plum

How to spell plum

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plum

What does plum mean?

1. nounA soft, round, sweet stone fruit with smooth purple, red, or yellow skin.
2. adjectiveHighly desirable or rewarding, especially of a job or opportunity.

Plum in a sentence

• noun

  She sliced a ripe plum over her morning yoghurt.

• adjective

  She landed a plum posting at the company headquarters in Paris.

• noun

  The orchard sold every plum within an hour of opening.

• adjective

  The contract was a plum assignment that everyone in the office wanted.

Where does plum come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Old English plume, the name for the soft stone fruit, which was itself borrowed from a Late Latin form pruna, taken from the classical Latin prunum meaning 'a plum'. The Romans in turn had it from the Greek proumnon, the word for the fruit of the plum tree. The same ancient root travelled into English a second time, through French, to give us 'prune', so a plum and a prune are linguistic cousins that simply took different routes. The figurative sense, a 'plum' as something especially desirable like a choice job, grew up in the 1600s and 1700s, when a ripe plum stood for the best and sweetest thing one could pick. The short, simple spelling is exactly why it is so easily confused with 'plumb', the unrelated word for a lead weight and vertical measurement, which keeps a silent 'b' that 'plum' the fruit never had.

How the word is built

• plum (single root, from Old English plume: the fruit; no productive affixes)