Word.ws English Dictionary

stem

UK/stɛm//stɪm/

stem noun: the stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors. Also the alternative form of steem.

Noun (1)

stem (plural stems)

  1. The stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors.
    • Where ye may all that are of noble ſtemm / Approach, and kiſs her ſacred veſtures hemm.1634, John Milton, “Arcades”, in Poems of Mr. John Milton, […], London: […] Ruth Raworth for Humphrey Mosely, […], published 1646, →OCLC, page 55
    • While I do pray, learn here thy stem / And true descent.1633, George Herbert, Church Monuments
  2. A branch of a family.
    • This is a stem / Of that victorious stock.1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
    1. A branch, or group of branches, located outside a family or other cladistic group, but which is more closely related to that group than to any other taxon of the same rank.
  3. An advanced or leading position; the lookout.
    • Wolsey sat at the stem more than twenty years.1655, Thomas Fuller, The Church-history of Britain; […], London: […] Iohn Williams […], →OCLC, (please specify |book=I to XI)
  4. The above-ground stalk (technically axis) of a vascular plant, and certain anatomically similar, below-ground organs such as rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, and corms.
    • After they are shot up thirty feet in length, they spread a very large top, having no bough nor twig in the trunk or the stem.1736, Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World in Five Books
    • He had placed her upon the grass by now, her back resting against the stem of a huge tree. At her question he stepped back where he could the better see her face.1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 212
  5. A slender supporting member of an individual part of a plant such as a flower or a leaf; also, by analogy, the shaft of a feather.
    • the stem of an apple or a cherry
    • Earless ghost swift moths become “invisible” to echolocating bats by forming mating clusters close (less than half a meter) above vegetation and effectively blending into the clutter of echoes that the bat receives from the leaves and stems around them.2013 May-June, William E. Conner, “An Acoustic Arms Race”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3, pages 206–7
  6. A narrow part on certain man-made objects, such as a wine glass, a tobacco pipe, a spoon.
  7. The main part of an uninflected word to which affixes may be added to form inflections of the word. A stem often has a more fundamental root. Systematic conjugations and declensions derive from their stems.
    • The praenomen and nomen for the most part consisted of simple stems with the suffix -us or -ius, which correspond to some of the contracted forms in other languages […].1945, E[lizabeth] G[idley] Withycombe, “Introduction”, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, →OCLC, page xiv
  8. (slang) A person's leg.
    • She was perfectly, fuckably proportioned everywhere else, both above and below her waist. A pocket-size Venus, with the longest stems he'd ever seen on someone so dang diminutive.2008, Lori Wilde, Rhonda Nelson, Cara Summers, August Harlequin Blaze
  9. (slang) The penis.
    • Waves of ecstasy roll through him as the moustachioed Casanova slides his stem in and out of the spaced-out chick.2005, Eric Bogosian, Wasted Beauty, page 135
  10. A vertical stroke of a letter.
  11. A vertical stroke marking the length of a note in written music.
    Synonyms:
    tail, virgula
  12. A premixed portion of a track for use in audio mastering and remixing.
    • Stem mastering processes a mix by breaking it down into several manageable pieces—that is, stereo stems. The stem approach allows the mastering engineer the opportunity to make larger or smaller changes to separate mix elements before the final compression and limiting are applied to the complete...2019, Karl Pedersen, Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Recording, Mixing, and Mastering Reference Handbook, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 268
Show 6 more meaningsShow fewer meanings
  1. (precisely) The vertical or nearly vertical forward extension of the keel, to which the forward ends of the planks or strakes are attached.
  2. (broadly) The front part of a vessel.
    • from stem to stern
    • Both we will walke vpon the loftie cliffes,
      And Chriſtian Merchants that with Ruſſian ſtems
      Plow vp huge furrowes in the Caſpian ſea,
      Shall vaile to vs, as Lords of al the Lake.c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC...
    Synonyms:
    bow, fore, forestem, prow, beak, prore
    Antonyms:
    stern, aft, poop
  3. A component on a bicycle that connects the handlebars to the bicycle fork.
  4. A part of an anatomic structure considered without its possible branches or ramifications.
  5. (slang) A crack pipe; or the long, hollow portion of a similar pipe (i.e. meth pipe) resembling a crack pipe.
  6. (UK) A winder on a clock, watch, or similar mechanism.

Verb (1)

stem (third-person singular simple present stems, present participle stemming, simple past and past participle stemmed)

  1. To remove the stem from.
    • to stem cherries; to stem tobacco leaves
  2. To be caused or derived; to originate.
    • The current crisis stems from the short-sighted politics of the previous government.
    • Weight stigma often stems from an idea that patients are at fault for their body size.2023 June 2, H Conley, “Studies show top surgery is safe for fat patients, but some surgeons still mandate weight loss”, in STAT
    Synonyms:
    to be due to, to arise from
  3. To descend in a family line.
  4. To direct the stem (of a ship) against; to make headway against.
    • Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 41, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 199
  5. (obsolete) To hit with the stem of a ship; to ram.
    • As when two warlike Brigandines at sea, / With murdrous weapons arm'd to cruell fight, / Doe meete together on the watry lea, / They stemme ech other with so fell despight, / That with the shocke of their owne heedlesse might, / Their wooden ribs are shaken nigh a sonder […]1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, IV.ii
  6. To ram (clay, etc.) into a blasting hole.

Verb (2)

stem (third-person singular simple present stems, present participle stemming, simple past and past participle stemmed)

  1. (transitive) To stop, hinder (for instance, a river or blood).
    • to stem a tide
    • [They] stem the flood with their erected breasts.1636 (date written), John Denham, “The Destruction of Troy, an Essay upon the Second Book of Virgils Æneis”, in Poems and Translations, with The Sophy, London: […] [John Macock] for H[enry]...
  2. To move the feet apart and point the tips of the skis inward in order to slow down the speed or to facilitate a turn.
  3. To use a stance with the feet spread apart, bracing them in opposite directions against the two walls of a chimney or dihedral.

Noun (2) capitalized: STEM

STEM (countable and uncountable, plural STEMs)

  1. (abbreviation, acronym, countable) Acronym of scanning transmission electron microscope.
  2. (abbreviation, acronym, uncountable) Acronym of science, technology, engineering, (and) mathematics.
    • Although these six classifications of the scope and responsibility and specific engineering expertise are interesting and useful, they come from within engineering itself and they don’t help us to disentangle STEM.2012 March 22nd, David Blockley, Engineering: A Very Short Introduction (309), Oxford University Press, chapter 1: “From idea to reality”, page 14
    • Table 7 shows that in general, the STEM subjects share more phrases with each other, while the opposite is true for the humanities subjects.2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Position vectors, homologous chromosomes and gamma rays: Promoting disciplinary literacy through Secondary Phrase Lists”, in English for Specific Purposes, →DOI...

Proper noun capitalized: Stem

Stem (plural Stems)

  1. A surname.

Also used as

stem is also the alternative form of steem.

stem is also the alternative form of STEM.

stem is also the alternative spelling of stemme.

stem meaning in Assamese, Nepali, Tagalog and Arabic

stem in Assamese

botany: above-ground stalk of a vascular plant
ঠাৰি thari
linguistics: main part of a word
ঠাৰি thari

stem in Nepali

botany: above-ground stalk of a vascular plant
डाँठ ḍā̃ṭh

stem in Tagalog

botany: above-ground stalk of a vascular plant
punungtangkay

stem in Arabic

botany: above-ground stalk of a vascular plant
سَاق نَبَات sāq nabāt
linguistics: main part of a word
أَصْل ʔaṣl
More languagesFewer languages
stem in Indonesian
kata dasar, tangkai not, stem
stem in Persian
ساقه sâqe, ستاک setâk, بند آوردن band âvardan
stem in Thai
ก้าน gâan
stem in Vietnamese
thân

Examples of stem in a sentence

  • Stem mastering processes a mix by breaking it down into several manageable pieces—that is, stereo stems.2019, Karl Pedersen, Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Recording, Mixing, and Mastering Reference Handbook, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page...
  • Stemm'd the wild torrent of a barbarous age.1711 May, [Alexander Pope], An Essay on Criticism, London: […] W[illiam] Lewis […]; and sold by W[illiam] Taylor […], T[homas] Osborn[e]...

All 40 example sentences with stem

Synonyms of stem

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of stem

Forms of stem

Noun
pluralstems
pluralSTEMs
Verb
third-person singular presentstems
present participlestemming
past participlestemmed
paststemmed
Proper noun
pluralStems

Past tense of stem: stemmed

Plural of stem: stems

Origin of stem

From Middle English stem, stemme, stempne, stevin, from Old English stemn (“stem”), from Proto-West Germanic *stamni, from Proto-Germanic *stamniz (“stem, tree stalk”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *steh₂- (“to stand, stay”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch stam (“stem”), German Stamm (“stem”), Danish and Norwegian stamme (“stem”), Danish stavn, stævn (“stem of a boat”), Faroese stavnur (“stem of a boat”), stovnur (“institution, public body, foundation, basis”), Icelandic stafn (“stem of a boat”), stofn (“trunk, stock, livestock, stem”), Norn stomna, stimna (“strength, ability”), Swedish stäm (“tree trunk, stem”), stäv (“stem of a boat”), stomme (“frame, structure”), Gothic 𐍃𐍄𐍉𐌼𐌰 (stōma, “substantial grounds, just cause”), Asturian estame (“stamen”), Aragonese estambre (“stamen”), Catalan estam (“stamen”), French étaim (“yarn”), Galician estame (“stamen, yarn”), Italian stame (“stamen”), Portuguese estame (“stem, yarn”), Spanish Spanish estambre (“stamen, a type of yarn”), Latin stāmen (“warp of a loom, thread hanging from a distaff”), Ancient Greek στῆμα (stêma, “stamen of a flower”), στάμνος (stámnos, “earthen jar, bottle for racking off wine”), Albanian shtamë (“pot, jar...

From Middle English stemmen, a borrowing from Old Norse stemma (“to stop, stem, dam”) (whence Danish stemme/stæmme (“to stem, dam up”)), from Proto-Germanic *stammijaną. Cognate with German stemmen, Middle Dutch stemmen, stempen. Compare stammer.

Acronym of science, technology, engineering, (and) mathematics.

Words formed from stem

Phrases with stem

11 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with stem

22 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about stem

What does stem mean?
Stem means the stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors.
What is stem in Assamese?
Stem in Assamese is ঠাৰি (thari). See Stem meaning in Assamese.
How do you use stem in a sentence?
Stem mastering processes a mix by breaking it down into several manageable pieces—that is, stereo stems.
What part of speech is stem?
Stem can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce stem?
Stem is pronounced /stɛm/ (UK).
What is the plural of stem?
The plural of stem is stems.

Words near stem in the dictionary

  1. Stelzers
  2. stelznerite
  3. stelæ
  4. stelè
  5. stelès
  6. stem
  7. stem and leaf
  8. stem borer
  9. stem borers
  10. stem cell
  11. stem cells

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stem (page history and authors); STEM (page history and authors); Stem (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: en-us-stem.ogg.

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