Word.ws English Dictionary

qualm

/kwɑːm/US/kwɑ(l)m/

qualm noun: a feeling of apprehension, doubt, fear etc.

Noun

qualm (plural qualms)

  1. A feeling of apprehension, doubt, fear etc.
    • [W]ho vvould not rather Sleep Quietly upon a Hammock, vvithout either Cares in his Head, or Crudities in his Stomach, then lye Carking upon a Bed of State, vvith the Qualms and Tvvinges that accompany Surfeits and Exceſs?1692, Roger L’Estrange, “[Miscellany Fables.] Fab[le] CCCLXXXIII. A Spider and the Gout [Reflexion].”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists: […], London: […] R[ichard] Sare, […], →OCLC...
    • "Do you have any particular qualms about leaving Pencey?" / "Oh, I have a few qualms, all right. Sure … but not too many. Not yet, anyway.[…]"1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 19
  2. A sudden sickly feeling; queasiness.
  3. A prick of the conscience; a moral scruple, a pang of guilt.
    • This lawyer has no qualms about saving people who are on the wrong side of the law.
  4. (UK, archaic, dialectal) Mortality; plague; pestilence.
  5. (UK, archaic, dialectal) A calamity or disaster.

Verb

qualm (third-person singular simple present qualms, present participle qualming, simple past and past participle qualmed)

  1. (intransitive) To have a sickly feeling.

qualm meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

qualm in Hindi

qualm, doubt
संशय sañśay

qualm in Tamil

ஐயவுணர்வு

qualm in Urdu

qualm, doubt
سنشیہ sanśaya

qualm in Bengali

দ্বিধা, মনের খটকা, অনুশোচনা
More languagesFewer languages
qualm in Malayalam
മനസ്താപം, മനസ്സാക്ഷിക്കുത്ത്, പശ്ചാത്താപം
qualm in Kannada
ಸಂಶಯ, ಮುಜುಗರ, ಅಸಮಾಧಾನ, ಅಧೈರ್ಯ

Examples of qualm in a sentence

  • We were beginning to suspect that her ethical qualms were sometimes performative, as the urgent need for fairness and justice seemed to apply to some people but not to others.
  • I took my qualms to Reddit: had the show really become sponcon slop?
  • Veteran GOP ad maker Jim Innocenzi had no qualms about the coded crudity, calling it “hilarious.”

All 16 example sentences with qualm

Synonyms of qualm

All synonyms of qualm

Forms of qualm

Noun
pluralqualms
alternative form (dialectal)calm
Verb
third-person singular presentqualms
present participlequalming
past participlequalmed
pastqualmed

Origin of qualm

Perhaps from Middle English qualm, cwalm (“death, sickness, plague”), which is from Old English cwealm (West Saxon: "death, disaster, plague"), ūtcualm (Anglian: "utter destruction"), from Proto-West Germanic *kwalm (“killing, death, destruction”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷelH- (“to stick, pierce; pain, injury, death”), whence also quell. Although the sense development is possible, this has the problem that there are no attestations in intermediate senses before the appearance of "pang of apprehension, etc." in the 16th century. The alternative etymology is from Dutch kwalm or German Qualm (“steam, vapor, mist”) earlier “daze, stupefaction”, which is from the root of German quellen (“to stream, well up”). The sense “feeling of faintness” is from 1530; “uneasiness, doubt” from 1553; “scruple of conscience” from 1649.

Words formed from qualm

Words that rhyme with qualm

9 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about qualm

What does qualm mean?
Qualm means a feeling of apprehension, doubt, fear etc.
What is qualm in Hindi?
Qualm in Hindi is संशय (sañśay). See Qualm meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is qualm?
Qualm can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce qualm?
Qualm is pronounced /kwɑːm/ (UK).
What is the plural of qualm?
The plural of qualm is qualms.

Words near qualm in the dictionary

  1. Qualla
  2. Qualley
  3. Qualleys
  4. Qualls
  5. Quallses
  6. qualm
  7. qualmed
  8. qualmier
  9. qualmiest
  10. qualminess
  11. qualming

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: qualm (page history and authors); संशय (Hindi) (page history and authors); qualm (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); سنشیہ (Urdu) (page history and authors); qualm (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); qualm (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); qualm (Kannada Wiktionary) (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: “qualm.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/qualm. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.