glaum
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To grasp or snatch (at), usually feebly or ineffectually; to grope (at) with the hands, as in the dark.
Example Sentences
- "My heart, for fear, gaed sough for sough, / To hear the thuds, and see the cluds / O' clans frae woods, in tartan duds, / Wha glaum'd at kingdoms three."
- ""Few get what they glaum at.""
- "She plays a game of blind-man's bute, / Glaums at the first she touches; / Even if the coof has coin enough, / She multiplies his riches."
- ""Katty, Katty Regan, for God's sake" he cried, all in a breath, his voice wild and high with surprise and despair, his hand glauming at nothing. Only with her last word had her own voice broken from her, letting him know whose[…]"
- "... used to be always embracing me Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course glauming me over and when I said I washed up and down as sar as possible asking me did you wash[…]"
- "Pádraig Ó Cíobháin, of An Spidéal, heard the word glauming from his mother-in-law , Kathleen Lanigan, in Kilkenny. The good lady offered this gloss: 'She'd be going around the house glauming for something - searching for [it].'"
Etymology
Alteration of dialectal clam, claum (“to grope or grasp ineffectually, snatch”), from Middle English *clammen, *clemmen, from Old English clæmman, clemman, from Proto-West Germanic *klammjan, from Proto-Germanic *klamjaną. In some senses, likely influenced by clamber. Compare dialectal glaump, glamp (“to grasp, snatch at, clutch, grope", also "gulp”), Scots clam, claum (“to grope or grasp ineffectually, snatch”), Norwegian klemme (“to seize with claws”), Middle High German klemmen (“to squeeze”). Doublet of glom. Related also to English clamp.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *clammen, clæmman, *klammjan, *klamjaną, gloumen, glámr