spam
/spæːm/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.05 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A large quantity or multitude of anything done repetitively or considered unusually or indiscriminately repetitive.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "I get far too much spam."
- "I received 58 spams yesterday."
- "In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters."
- "An Act to provide for the control of spam, which is unsolicited commercial communications sent in bulk by electronic mail or by text or multi-media messaging to mobile telephone numbers, and to provide for matters connected therewith."
- "Transformed by programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankenstein proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with something on the order of 200 messages in which it attempted, and failed, to cancel its own messages."
- "Stop spamming that special attack!"
Etymology
The original sense (canned ham) is a proprietary name registered by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in U.S., 1937. It is presumed to be a conflation of either "spiced ham" or "shoulder of pork and ham" but was soon extended to other kinds of canned meat. Hormel spells the trademarked name in all upper case. The use for unsolicited and unwanted email derives from a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch. In the 1970 sketch, a group of Vikings in a restaurant repeatedly chant the word "spam". The earliest recorded real-life use for this sense occurs around 1993 which finds reference in a newsgroup post dated March 31, 1993, but the term may have been in use on "Multi-User Dungeons" (MUDs) in the 1980s.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /spæːm/
- British English: /spæm/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
bacn
Official SPAM home page