Rams

How to spell rams

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rams

What does rams mean?

1. nounMore than one ram; adult male sheep.
2. verbDrives or strikes something forcefully, as a single subject does in the present tense.

Rams in a sentence

• noun

  The farmer kept two rams in the lower field.

• verb

  The tug rams the barge gently into the dock.

• noun

  The rams locked horns during the breeding season.

• verb

  He rams the key into the stiff lock and turns it hard.

Where does rams come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word ram comes straight from Old English ramm, the native Anglo-Saxon name for an uncastrated male sheep, and it has close cousins in other Germanic languages such as Old High German ram. From the animal's habit of charging head-first, the noun gave rise to a verb meaning to strike or drive something with great force, a sense recorded in English from the medieval period onward. The same imagery later attached to the battering ram, a heavy beam swung against fortress gates, and to the mechanical ram used in pumps and presses. The plural and the third-person verb form are both made simply by adding -s, so rams hides no spelling trap beyond its very short, regular shape. The spelling has stayed almost unchanged for more than a thousand years.

How the word is built

• ram (male sheep / to drive forcefully)
• -s (plural noun marker, or third-person singular verb marker)