Swarm

How to spell swarm

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce swarm

What does swarm mean?

1. nounA large, dense group of insects or other creatures moving together, or by extension any thick crowd.
2. verbTo move in or gather as a large, dense crowd, or to be crowded with people or creatures.

Swarm in a sentence

• noun

  A swarm of bees settled in the chimney over the weekend.

• verb

  Fans began to swarm around the stage door after the concert.

• noun

  A swarm of tourists filled the narrow street outside the museum.

• verb

  Reporters tend to swarm outside the courthouse during a major trial.

Where does swarm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Swarm comes from the Old English word swearm, which meant a multitude, a crowd, or specifically a body of bees clustering together. It descends from a common Germanic root, with close relatives such as the Dutch zwerm and the German Schwarm, all carrying the same sense of a dense, moving mass. Some scholars connect this Germanic root to an older idea of a humming or buzzing sound, the noise made by countless wings, which would tie the word to the very thing it most often describes. The spelling has stayed remarkably close to its early form, dropping the older 'ea' for a simpler 'wa', so the modern trap is mostly the unstressed vowel sound, which the 'ar' captures. The verb sense, meaning to gather or move in a crowd, grew naturally out of the noun and was well established by the 1400s.

How the word is built

• swarm (whole native root, from Old English swearm: a multitude or cluster); no separable prefix or suffix