Swim
verbTo move through water by moving the body, arms, and legs.
How to spell swim
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce swim
What does swim mean?
- verbTo move through water by moving the body, arms, and legs.
- nounA period or act of swimming.
Swim in a sentence
-
verb
She likes to swim a few lengths before work each morning.
-
noun
After the long drive they went for a quick swim in the sea.
-
verb
The children learned to swim at the local pool last summer.
-
noun
A morning swim leaves her feeling refreshed for the rest of the day.
Where does swim come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Swim comes straight from Old English swimman, a strong verb meaning to move through water by propelling the body. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic root swimman, which is also the ancestor of the German schwimmen and the Dutch zwemmen, all carrying the same watery sense. Because it is a native Germanic strong verb, its past tense shifts the vowel rather than adding an ending, giving the older pattern swim, swam, swum. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years, with the single short vowel and the simple final consonant surviving intact. That very simplicity is why it is one of the easiest words in English to spell correctly.
How the word is built
- swim (whole Germanic root; no prefix or suffix in the base form)
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.