Stemmed

How to spell stemmed

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stemmed

What does stemmed mean?

1. verbOriginated from or had its source in a particular thing.
2. verbStopped or held back the flow or spread of something.

Stemmed in a sentence

• Her interest in cooking stemmed from years of helping her grandmother.

• The paramedic quickly stemmed the bleeding with firm pressure.

• The whole dispute stemmed from a single misread email.

• Tighter controls stemmed the spread of the rumour through the office.

Where does stemmed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'stem', and the spelling traces back to two related strands. The plant sense, a stalk or stem, comes from the Old English 'stefn' or 'stemn', a Germanic word for the upright trunk or stalk of a plant, and the figurative verb meaning 'to originate from' grew out of that image of something rising from a common stock. The other verb, meaning 'to stop or hold back', came into English in the medieval period from the Old Norse 'stemma', meaning 'to dam up' or 'to stop', which is why we speak of stemming a flood or stemming bleeding. Both verbs settled on the single short spelling 'stem', and English doubles the final consonant when adding an ending after a short stressed vowel, giving 'stemmed'. That doubling is the main spelling trap: writers who think of the bare word 'stem' often drop one m and produce 'stemed'. The same Germanic root survives in nautical talk of a ship's stem, the upright timber at the bow.

How the word is built

• stem (Old English stefn: stalk of a plant)
• -med (past-tense ending; final m doubled after a short stressed vowel)