Streamed

How to spell streamed

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce streamed

What does streamed mean?

1. verbMoved in a continuous flow, as of liquid, light, or people.
2. verbTransmitted or played audio or video over the internet in real time.

Streamed in a sentence

• Sunlight streamed through the open kitchen window all morning.

• The company streamed its annual conference live to staff working from home.

• Rainwater streamed down the gutter and into the drain.

• She streamed the new album while she cooked dinner.

Where does streamed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word stream comes from the Old English strēam, which meant a flowing body of water such as a brook or current, and it goes back to a Germanic root shared with the Dutch stroom and the German Strom, both meaning a current or river. That root carried the underlying idea of something flowing steadily, which is why the word later stretched far beyond water to describe anything moving in a continuous line, from a stream of traffic to a stream of light. The past-tense form streamed simply adds the regular -ed ending, and because the base ends in a single vowel-plus-m there is no doubling, so the spelling stays as stream plus ed. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the verb gained an entirely modern meaning: transmitting audio or video over the internet for playback as it arrives, picturing the data as a continuous current. The everyday spelling trap is hearing the ending as a hard 't' sound (streemd) yet still writing the regular -ed.

How the word is built

• stream (Old English strēam: a flowing body of water)
• -ed (past-tense suffix)