Swam

How to spell swam

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce swam

What does swam mean?

1. verbThe simple past tense of swim: moved through water using the limbs.

Swam in a sentence

• She swam thirty lengths of the pool before breakfast.

• The children swam across the lake last summer while their parents watched.

Where does swam come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'swim', which descends from the Old English swimman, meaning 'to move through water by the action of limbs'. It belongs to the native Germanic stock of English and is related to similar forms in Old Norse, Old High German and Dutch. Like many of the oldest English verbs, swim is a so-called strong verb: instead of adding an ending such as -ed, it marks the past by changing the vowel inside the word, a pattern called ablaut. That is why the present 'swim' becomes the simple past 'swam' and the past participle 'swum', following the same machinery that gives ring, rang, rung and sing, sang, sung. The spelling trap for adults is purely this vowel: 'swam' is the plain past tense ('I swam yesterday'), while 'swum' is the participle that pairs with have or had.

How the word is built

• swam (past tense of 'swim', formed by an inherited vowel change, ablaut, from swim to swam to swum)