Swamp
nounAn area of low, waterlogged ground, often with dense vegetation and standing water.
How to spell swamp
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce swamp
What does swamp mean?
- nounAn area of low, waterlogged ground, often with dense vegetation and standing water.
- verbTo flood with water, or to overwhelm with a large quantity of something.
Swamp in a sentence
-
noun
The hikers lost a boot in the thick mud of the swamp.
-
verb
A sudden wave can swamp a small boat in seconds.
-
noun
Alligators and herons thrive in the warm coastal swamp.
-
verb
New orders began to swamp the tiny customer service team.
Where does swamp come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Swamp appears in English in the early 1600s, and its earlier history is genuinely a little murky, which is fitting for the word. The leading view connects it to a Germanic family of words for spongy, soft ground, ultimately tied to an old root that also gave English 'sump' (a pit collecting liquid) and is related to dialectal terms meaning sponge or fungus. Some scholars point to Low German and Dutch relatives such as 'swamp' or words for mushroom and marsh, suggesting the term may have been reinforced by Dutch or Low German contact. The earliest English uses describe boggy, waterlogged land in the American colonies, which is why the noun feels so closely linked to North American geography. By the nineteenth century the figurative verb had emerged, picturing a person 'flooded' or 'submerged' by too much work or too many demands, much as low ground is submerged by water.
How the word is built
- swamp (a waterlogged tract of land); also used as a verb meaning to flood or overwhelm
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.