Word.ws English Dictionary

stum

/stʌm/

stum noun: unfermented grape juice; must.

Noun

stum (countable and uncountable, plural stums)

  1. (obsolete) Unfermented grape juice; must.
    • Let our wines, without mixture of stum, be all fine.1620s, Ben Jonson, Leges Convivales
    • And with thy stum ferment their fainting cause.1682, John Dryden, The Medal
  2. (obsolete) Wine revived by new fermentation, resulting from the admixture of must.
    • Drink ev'ry letter on't in stum,
      And make it brisk champaign become.1664, Samuel Butler, Hudibras; with notes by T. R. Nash, volume 1, published 1835, Part II, Canto 1, page 265
    • To each hogshead of genuine Bordeaux wine, there are four gallons of Benicarlo, half a gallon of stum wine, and a small quantity of Hermitage added, which mixture undergoes a slight fermentation, and is then exported under the name of claret.1859, The family manual and servants' guide, 9th edition

Verb

stum (third-person singular simple present stums, present participle stumming, simple past and past participle stummed)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To ferment.
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To renew (wine etc.) by mixing must with it and raising a new fermentation.
    • We stum our crude wines […]to renew their spirits.1696, John Floyer, The praeternatural State of animal Hurnours described by their sensible Qualities
  3. (obsolete, transitive) To fume, as a cask of liquor, with burning sulphur.
    • Since I have taken this method with cyder, it has proved more like wine than common drink, but then I racked it off a second and a third time, as soon as it appeared fine, and then stummed the cask that received it the lasttime […]1789, “Cultivation of the Vine”, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, volume 1

Proper noun capitalized: Stum

Stum (plural Stums)

  1. A surname from Dutch.

Forms of stum

Noun
pluralstums
Verb
third-person singular presentstums
present participlestumming
past participlestummed
paststummed
Proper noun
pluralStums

Origin of stum

From Dutch stom (“unfermented”, literally “mute; dull”). Compare French vin muet, German stummer Wein. Doublet of shtum.

Borrowed from Dutch Stum.

Words that rhyme with stum

42 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about stum

What does stum mean?
Stum means unfermented grape juice; must.
What part of speech is stum?
Stum can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce stum?
Stum is pronounced /stʌm/.
What is the plural of stum?
The plural of stum is stums.

Words near stum in the dictionary

  1. stulting
  2. stults
  3. stulty
  4. Stultz
  5. Stultzes
  6. stum
  7. Stumbaugh
  8. Stumbaughs
  9. stumble
  10. stumble across
  11. stumble against

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stum (page history and authors); Stum (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-stum.wav.

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