tame

/teɪm/

tame adjective: under human control.

Image: Peter Shanks from Lithgow, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

tame (comparative tamer, superlative tamest)

Under human control.
Docile or tranquil towards humans.
- The lion was quite tame.
(figuratively) Of a person, well-behaved; not radical or extreme.
- What, for example, were Fraunhofer's lines? McArdle had just been studying the matter with the aid of our tame scientist at the office, and he picked from his desk two of those many-coloured spectral bands which bear a general resemblance to the hat-ribbons of some young and ambitious cricket club.1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC
(obsolete) Of a non-Westernised person, accustomed to European society.
- The victim was Captain Bickenson, who had gone there from Port Darwin to try the pearling grounds, and for this purpose employed a number of tame blacks about the schooner.1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 290
Not exciting.
- This party is too tame for me.
- For a thriller, that film was really tame.
Synonyms:

dull, flat, insipid, unexciting

Antonyms:

exciting
Crushed; subdued; depressed; spiritless.
- tame slaves of the laborious plougha. 1685, Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon, Paraphrase on the 148th Psalm
Capable of being represented as a finite closed polygonal chain.

Antonyms:

wild

Verb (1)

tame (third-person singular simple present tames, present participle taming, simple past and past participle tamed)

(transitive) To make or become tame; to domesticate (an animal).
- He tamed the wild horse.
- Tambourines are shy birds and do not tame easily.2006, Gayle Soucek, Doves, page 78
Synonyms:

gentle
(transitive) To make submissive.
- The governor tames the engine.
To take control of something that is unruly.
- Police have to tame the riots.

Verb (2)

tame (third-person singular simple present tames, present participle taming, simple past and past participle tamed)

(UK, dialectal, obsolete) To broach or enter upon; to taste, as a liquor; to divide; to distribute; to deal out.
- In the time of famine he is the Joseph of the country, and keeps the poor from starving. Then he tameth his stacks of corn, which not his covetousness, but providence, hath reserved for time of need.1642, Thomas Fuller, The Holy State, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: […] Roger Daniel for John Williams, […], →OCLC

Proper noun capitalized: Tame

Tame

A surname transferred from the nickname.
A river in the West Midlands, Warwickshire and Staffordshire, England, a tributary to the Trent.
A river in Greater Manchester, England, which joins the River Goyt at Stockport, then becoming the River Mersey.

tame meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

tame in Hindi

not wild: कोमल komal, नम्र namra, दयालु dayālu

tame in Urdu

بےمزہ, دبیل, دھیما, پالتو, رام, روکھا پھیکا

tame in Bengali

পোষা, বশীভূত

More languagesFewer languages

tame in Telugu: మచ్చిక maccika
tame in Malayalam: നാട്ട് nāṭṭŭ
tame in Kannada: ಪಳಗು, ಪಳಗಿಸು, ಸಾಧುವಾಗಿ ಮಾಡು, ಕುಗ್ಗಿಸು
tame in Sanskrit: दाम्यति dāmyati
tame in Tagalog: maamo
tame in Arabic: أَلِيف ʔalīf, رَوَّضَ rawwaḍa, آلَفَ ʔālafa
tame in Malay: jinak
tame in Indonesian: jinak, menjinakkan
tame in Persian: رام rām, دام dām
tame in Thai: เชื่อง chʉ̂ʉang
tame in Vietnamese: đã thuần hoá, đã dạy thuần, dạy cho thuần

Examples of tame in a sentence

She loved taming horses on Saturday.
A tame automorphism is a product of elementary automorphisms, and a non-tame automorphism is called wild.
She never quite succeeded in taming the animals: two squirrels, a fox, and a ring-tailed civet cat.

All 40 example sentences with tame

Synonyms of tame

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of tame

Forms of tame

Adjective
comparative	tamer
superlative	tamest
Verb
third-person singular present	tames
present participle	taming
past participle	tamed
past	tamed

Past tense of tame: tamed

Origin of tame

From Middle English tame, tome, weak inflection forms of Middle English tam, tom, from Old English tam, tom (“domesticated, tame”), from Proto-West Germanic *tam (“tame”), from Proto-Germanic *tamaz (“brought into the home, tame”), from Proto-Indo-European *demh₂- (“to tame, dominate”). Cognate with Scots tam, tame (“tame”), Saterland Frisian tom (“tame”), West Frisian tam (“tame”), Dutch tam (“tame”), Low German Low German tamm, tahm (“tame”), German zahm (“tame”), Danish tam (“tame”), Swedish tam (“tame”), Icelandic tamur (“tame”). The verb is from Middle English tamen, temen, temien, from Old English temian (“to tame”), from Proto-West Germanic *tammjan, from Proto-Germanic *tamjaną (“to tame”).

From Middle English tamen (“to cut into, broach”). Compare French entamer.

English surname, from the adjective Middle English tame as a nickname, and in some cases a habitational surname from Thame in Oxfordshire.

Words formed from tame

Words that rhyme with tame

37 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about tame

What does tame mean?: Tame means under human control.
What is tame in Hindi?: Tame in Hindi is कोमल (komal), नम्र (namra), दयालु (dayālu). See Tame meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is tame?: Tame can be an adjective, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce tame?: Tame is pronounced /teɪm/.

Words near tame in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: tame (page history and authors); Tame (page history and authors); tame (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); tame (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); tame (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); നാട്ട് (Malayalam) (page history and authors); tame (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-tame.ogg.

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