ham
/ˈhæm/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.12 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A thigh and/or buttock of a hog slaughtered for meat; (occasionally) the corresponding cut from some other animal.
Countable
noun
Electronic mail that is wanted; email that is not spam or junk mail.
Countable; Informal; Uncountable
noun
An overacting or amateurish performer; an actor with an especially showy or exaggerated style.
noun
Example Sentences
- ""I'll have you so your hams will stand out like horse's shanks!" de declared."
- "a little piece of ham for the cat"
- "She put some ham in the beans and cut up some sweet potatoes to boil."
- "Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”"
- "Near-synonym: camp it up"
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English hamme, from Old English hamm (“inner or hind part of the knee, ham”), from Proto-West Germanic *hammu, from Proto-Germanic *hamō, *hammō, *hanmō, from Proto-Indo-European *kónh₂m (“leg”). Cognate with Dutch ham (“ham”), dialectal German Hamme (“hind part of the knee, ham”), dialectal Swedish ham (“the hind part of the knee”), Icelandic höm (“the ham or haunch of a horse”), Old Irish cnáim (“bone”), Ancient Greek κνήμη (knḗmē, “shinbone”). Compare gammon and gam.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈhæm/
- British English: /ˈhæm/