gaum
/ɡɔːm/
gaum noun: heed; attention. Also the alternative form of gorm.
Noun (1)
gaum (uncountable)
- Heed; attention.
- "S'cat! s'cat! — set that cat off that barns knee — it al puzzum it!"
"Ah've tel'd 'em awal abart that tu monny a hunderd times, bud thuh tak no moar gaum o' muh then a stoop."1862, C. Clough Robinson, The Dialect of Leeds and its Neighbourhood, Illustrated, page 18 - "Good-night, Uncle Nat," he called. Uncle Nat walked on in grim silence, never turning his head, for quite half a dozen paces. Then he came back to the gate to which Adam had also returned. "Tak' no gaum o' my gruntlin', Addy," asked Uncle.1919, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, The Taming of Nan, page 31
- "S'cat! s'cat! — set that cat off that barns knee — it al puzzum it!"
Verb (1)
gaum (third-person singular simple present gaums, present participle gauming, simple past and past participle gaumed)
- To understand; comprehend; consider.
- "We said nowt on 't. Ther' no 'casion to stir up trouble. But we all gaumed 'at when he heerd t' sounds o' them 'at com to lowse us he'd crawled off into t' workin's an' brayed his head agean a shou'der o' quartz."1893, Keighley Snowden, Tales of the Yorkshire Wolds, page 171
- 'Nobody gaums where we are now,' I said.1896, James Keighley Snowden, Web of an Old Weaver, quoted in The English Dialect Dictionary (1900 edition)
Verb (2)
gaum (third-person singular simple present gaums, present participle gauming, simple past and past participle gaumed)
- To smear.
- No, bubby, couldn't hev the wax. Gaum him all up so 't mammy 'd hafter nigh abaout skin him tu git him clean ag'in; […]1894, Rowland Evans Robinson, Danvis Folks, chapter VI, The Paring-Bee, page 117
- Isn't it horrible, mamma! One fly produces fifty-two billions of descendants in 60 days in June and July, and they go and crawl over sick people and wade through pus, and sputa, and foul matter exuding from sores, and gaum themselves with every kind of disease-germ, then they go to everybody's...c. 1908, Mark Twain, “Little Bessie”, in Mark Twain's Fables of Man, published 1972
Noun (2)
gaum (uncountable)
- Grime.
- "douse your head under the pump and wash some of the gaum off your hands and we'll see what your Aunt Debbie can do for that empty feelin'."1913, William Gerard Chapman, “Wine of the Orchard”, in Outing: Sport, Adventure, Travel Fiction, volume 61, page 210
- Said 'Black Bill' Walker, of Walker's Valley, in speaking of the forge: 'I never heerd sech a rackity-rack! Ye'd think the heavens was fallin' down! Them fellers aworkin' thar in the sweat an' gaum reminded me more of the gate to the bad place!'1927, Robert Lindsay Mason, The lure of the Great Smokies, page 150
Noun (3)
gaum (plural gaums)
- A bit, a small amount.
- When he had let what he deemed was a sufficiency of blood out of the incised vein, he called to Elvira to bring a spoon of "sut" from off the back of the fireplace and a "gaum" of spiderwebs from somewhere or other.1939, Esquire, volume 12, numbers 1-3, page 54
- The Rockwellian palette was what Arkansans would call a "gaum" of sentiment— sentimentality, the cynical would say. His paintings were what these same cynics would probably call "representational," […]1978, Editorials on File, volume 9, number 2, page 1392
Noun (4)
gaum (plural gaums)
- A useless person.
- He's a scrawny gaum of a lad named Tony Regan, the tailor's eldest son.1946, Liam O'Flaherty, Land, →ISBN
- I saw standing up out of the grass a murderous length of sharp steel. Some gaum of a farm boy had abandoned this scythe while cutting bundles of sourgrass for cattle-breeding.1947, James Reynolds, A world of horses: A conversation piece, page 229
Noun (5)
gaum (plural gaums)
- A village.
Also used as
gaum is also the alternative form of gorm.
Examples of gaum in a sentence
- Simply gaum them all over with thick claybank mud and throw them into the fire.1990, Appalachian Journal, volume 18, page 196:
- The air bore them up; they circled lazily over the heads of men, they lit on hands and faces and in the gaum of wounds, they died underfoot.2000, Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War, →ISBN, page 106:
- "There aint a gaum of grub to be found nowheres.1990, Donald Harington, The Cockroaches of Stay More, →ISBN, page 191:
Forms of gaum
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| alternative form | goam |
| plural | gaums |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | gaums |
| present participle | gauming |
| past participle | gaumed |
| past | gaumed |
| alternative form | gorm |
Origin of gaum
The noun is from dialectal (Northern) English, from Middle English gome, from Old Norse gaum, gaumr (“heed, attention”), from Proto-Germanic *gaumō (“attention”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰowe- (“to heed, pay attention”). The verb is from Middle English *gomen, from the noun. Compare native Middle English yemen, from Old English ġīeman (“to care for, heed”), and Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐌿𐌼𐌾𐌰𐌽 (gaumjan, “observe”).
Uncertain; perhaps a variant of gum.
Unknown. Possibly related to gaum (“smear”, verb).
Words formed from gaum
Words that rhyme with gaum
Questions about gaum
- What does gaum mean?
- Gaum means heed; attention.
- How do you use gaum in a sentence?
- Simply gaum them all over with thick claybank mud and throw them into the fire.
- What part of speech is gaum?
- Gaum can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce gaum?
- Gaum is pronounced /ɡɔːm/.
- What is the plural of gaum?
- The plural of gaum is gaums.
Words near gaum in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: gaum (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “gaum.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gaum. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.