Word.ws English Dictionary

oom

/ʊm/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

General South African/ʊəm/

oom noun: an older man, especially an uncle. (Frequently as a respectful form of address.).

Noun (1)

oom (plural ooms)

  1. (South Africa) An older man, especially an uncle. (Frequently as a respectful form of address.)
    • He raised his glass. ‘Here's to you, Oom Ben,’ he said. ‘Give them hell.’1979, André Brink, A Dry White Season, Vintage, published 1998, page 73

Phrase capitalized: OOM

OOM

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of out of memory.
    • If you write infinitely recursive code, you might generate an OOM error.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of out of mana.

Noun (2) capitalized: OOM

OOM (plural OOMs)

  1. An instance of an out of memory error.
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of order of magnitude.

Forms of oom

pluralooms
pluralOOMs

Origin of oom

Borrowed from Afrikaans oom. Doublet of eam and ohm.

By initialism or acronymy.

Questions about oom

What does oom mean?
Oom means an older man, especially an uncle. (Frequently as a respectful form of address.).
What part of speech is oom?
Oom can be a noun or a phrase.
How do you pronounce oom?
Oom is pronounced /ʊəm/ (General South African).
What is the plural of oom?
The plural of oom is ooms.

Words near oom in the dictionary

  1. oolong teas
  2. oolongs
  3. OOLR
  4. OOLRs
  5. OOLs
  6. oom
  7. oom-pa-pa
  8. oom-pah
  9. oom-pah-like
  10. oom-pah-pah
  11. Ooma

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: oom (page history and authors); OOM (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-oom.wav.

Cite this entry: “oom.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/oom. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.