Rum

How to spell rum

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rum

What does rum mean?

1. nounA strong alcoholic spirit distilled from sugarcane juice or molasses.

Rum in a sentence

• He poured a measure of dark rum over the ice.

• The cocktail blends rum with lime and mint.

Where does rum come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Rum is one of those words whose origin remains genuinely murky, which is unusual for so common a drink. It first appears in English in the mid-1600s, attached to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, especially Barbados, where the spirit was distilled from molasses and cane juice. The leading theory is that it is a shortening of the longer slang words 'rumbullion' or 'rumbustion', both meaning a great uproar or tumult, perhaps describing the rowdy effect of the drink. Some have suggested a link to the Latin 'saccharum' (sugar), but that connection is unproven and probably a tidy after-the-fact guess. The separate British adjective 'rum', meaning odd or peculiar, arose later from old underworld cant, where 'rum' once oddly meant fine or good before flipping to mean strange. Because the word is so short and phonetically plain, the spelling has stayed simple ever since.

How the word is built

• rum (single morpheme; an unanalysable root word of obscure 17th-century origin)