Tame

How to spell tame

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tame

What does tame mean?

1. adjectiveNot wild or dangerous; domesticated, gentle, or lacking excitement.
2. verbTo make an animal or a person less wild, or to bring something under control.

Tame in a sentence

• adjective

  The rescued fox grew surprisingly tame around its handlers.

• verb

  It took months of patience to tame the nervous stray.

• adjective

  Critics found the sequel rather tame compared with the original.

• verb

  The new budget aims to tame the company's rising costs.

Where does tame come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English adjective tam, meaning 'domesticated' or 'made gentle', which was used of animals brought under human control. It traces back to a shared Germanic root, seen in the Dutch tam and the German zahm, both carrying the same idea of an animal no longer wild. Scholars connect this Germanic family to a much older Indo-European root meaning 'to subdue' or 'to fit into a household', a sense also echoed in the Latin domare, 'to tame', the source of words like 'domestic'. The verb sense, 'to make tame', grew naturally out of the adjective during the medieval period as people described the act of breaking and training beasts. Because the word is short and was spelled phonetically from very early on, its modern form has stayed remarkably stable, with the silent final 'e' simply marking the long vowel.

How the word is built

• tame (from Old English tam: domesticated, gentle)