Seam

How to spell seam

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce seam

What does seam mean?

1. nounThe line along which two pieces of fabric or material are sewn or joined together.
2. nounA thin layer of coal, ore, or other mineral lying between layers of rock.

Seam in a sentence

• The seam of her jeans split open at the knee.

• The miners followed a rich seam of coal deep underground.

• A tailor reinforced every seam on the heavy coat.

• Geologists mapped a narrow seam of copper in the hillside.

Where does seam come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Seam comes straight from the Old English seam, meaning the line of stitching where two pieces of cloth are joined, and it has kept that core sense for well over a thousand years. The Old English form grew out of a shared Germanic root, related to Dutch zoom and German Saum, all tied to an even older idea of sewing or binding together. The same ancient root that gave us 'sew' lies behind it, which is a useful memory hook: a seam is literally where something is sewn. By extension, miners borrowed the word from the 1400s onward to describe a thin layer of coal or ore sandwiched between rock, picturing it as a stitched line running through the ground. The spelling trap is purely aural, since seam sounds identical to 'seem'; remembering the link to sewing and the visible 'a' in cloth seams helps keep the two apart.

How the word is built

• seam (single root, from Old English seam: a sewn join)

Words that sound like seam

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

• seem: To give the impression or appearance of being something, without that necessarily being the case.