Word.ws English Dictionary

sweem

sweem verb: to swoon, faint; be giddy.

Verb

sweem (third-person singular simple present sweems, present participle sweeming, simple past and past participle sweemed)

  1. (UK, dialectal) To swoon, faint; be giddy.

Noun

sweem (plural sweems)

  1. (UK, dialectal) A swoon, fainting; a state of giddiness or faintness.

Forms of sweem

Verb
third-person singular presentsweems
present participlesweeming
past participlesweemed
pastsweemed
Noun
pluralsweems

Origin of sweem

From Middle English swemen, from Old English *swǣman, from Proto-West Germanic *swaimijan, from Proto-Germanic *swaimijaną, from Proto-Indo-European *sweh₁- (“to move, sway”). Cognate with Scots sweem, soom (“to spin at high speed; float”), Icelandic sveima (“to float, hover; wander, roam”).

Words formed from sweem

  • sweemy
  • sweemish

Questions about sweem

What does sweem mean?
Sweem means to swoon, faint; be giddy.
What part of speech is sweem?
Sweem can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of sweem?
The past tense of sweem is sweemed.

Words near sweem in the dictionary

  1. Sweedens
  2. sweedie
  3. Sweedy
  4. Sweek
  5. Sweelinckian
  6. sweem
  7. Sween
  8. Sweeney
  9. Sweeneys
  10. Sweens
  11. sweeny

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sweem (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: “sweem.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sweem. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.