Stream

How to spell stream

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stream

What does stream mean?

1. nounA small, narrow river or any steady flow of liquid, people, or things.
2. verbTo flow steadily, or to transmit audio or video over the internet for immediate playback.

Stream in a sentence

• noun

  A clear stream ran along the edge of the campsite.

• verb

  Many households now stream films instead of buying discs.

• noun

  A steady stream of customers entered the shop after lunch.

• verb

  Rainwater began to stream down the steep driveway.

Where does stream come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stream is a native English word, coming straight from the Old English strēam, which meant a flowing body of water or a current. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic source straumaz, the same ancestor that produced the German Strom and the Dutch stroom, and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'to flow'. The Sanskrit srotas, meaning 'a stream', shares that distant root, showing how widely the idea of flowing water spread. For most of its life the word described running water, but the sense of any steady flow grew naturally from it, giving us a stream of traffic, a stream of words, and eventually the modern computing sense of data flowing over a network. Because it is an old Germanic word with the straightforward 'str-' opening and the familiar '-eam' ending, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• stream (single root from Old English strēam: flowing water); no affixes