Tom

How to spell tom

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tom

What does tom mean?

1. nounAn adult male cat.
2. nounAn adult male turkey.

Tom in a sentence

• The big ginger tom prowled along the garden fence at dusk.

• The farmer kept one large tom apart from the hens for breeding.

• Our neighbour's tom keeps fighting with the other cats on the street.

• A mature tom can weigh far more than the female birds.

Where does tom come from?

Language of origin: Hebrew

This word is simply the familiar shortening of the man's name Thomas, which itself came into English through Latin and Greek from an Aramaic word meaning 'twin'. By the 1700s English speakers had begun using common male first names as generic labels for male animals, much as 'jenny' came to mean a female donkey. 'Tom' was attached to the male of several species, most famously the cat, where 'tomcat' is recorded from the middle of the eighteenth century and was soon clipped back to plain 'tom'. The same habit gave us the 'tom' turkey, the adult male bird. Because the word is just a name pressed into service, its spelling stayed short and regular, and the only real trap is remembering it is a lowercase common noun rather than the capitalised personal name.

How the word is built

• tom (generic male-animal name, from the personal name Thomas)