Word.ws English Dictionary

toom

toom adjective: empty; bare.

Adjective

toom (comparative more toom, superlative most toom)

  1. (Northern England, Scotland, dialectal, rare) Empty; bare.
    • Gin she was toom afore, she's toomer now,
      Her heart was like to loup out at her mou'.1778, Alexander Ross, Fortunate Shepherdess, page 62
    • Then hie to the Custom House, add to your pleasures, Now you're well cover'd, so toom the new measures: It ne'er will be finish'd, I'll wager a groat, Till they've cut a canal te admit five-men boats!1825, The Tyneside Songster

Noun (1)

toom (plural tooms)

  1. (Scottish) A piece of waste ground where rubbish is deposited.

Verb

toom (third-person singular simple present tooms, present participle tooming, simple past and past participle toomed)

  1. (dialectal, rare) To empty; teem.

Noun (2)

toom (usually uncountable, plural tooms)

  1. (usually) Vacant time, leisure.
    • He had exhausted Bath, but his connections and introductions made the transition easy. There was toom for two in the capital.1978, Art and Artists

Examples of toom in a sentence

  • She set down the bowl and breathed over it, "Be never toom." The woman lived to a great age, but never saw the bottom of the bowl.1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume II, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 163:
  • It seemed to him that his soul had gone from him, and he was as toom as a hazel shell.1902, John Buchan, The Outgoing of the Tide:
  • But 'the cupboard was toom' would utter the voice of real despair.1951, Ivor John Carnegie Brown, I break my word, page 120:
  • His tabard was 'toom' — bare or empty — and Balliol, the unmade king, became 'Toom Tabard'.1974, Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: the later Middle Ages, page 50:

Synonyms of toom

All synonyms of toom

Forms of toom

Adjective
comparativemore toom
superlativemost toom
Noun
pluraltooms
Verb
third-person singular presenttooms
present participletooming
past participletoomed
pasttoomed

Origin of toom

From Middle English toom, tom, from Old English tōm (“empty”), from Proto-West Germanic *tōm(ī), from Proto-Germanic *tōm(ij)az (“free, available, empty”), from Proto-Indo-European *doma- (“to tame”), *dema- (“to build”). Cognate with Danish and Swedish tom (“empty, vacant”), Icelandic tómur (“empty”).

From Middle English toom, tome, tom, from Old Norse tóm (“vacant time, leisure”), from Proto-Germanic *tōmą (“vacant time, leisure”). Related to Old Norse tómr (“vacant, empty”).

Words formed from toom

Words that rhyme with toom

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about toom

What does toom mean?
Toom means empty; bare.
How do you use toom in a sentence?
She set down the bowl and breathed over it, "Be never toom." The woman lived to a great age, but never saw the bottom of the bowl.
What part of speech is toom?
Toom can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.

Words near toom in the dictionary

  1. toolsy
  2. tooltip
  3. tooltipped
  4. tooltipping
  5. tooltips
  6. toom
  7. Toom-Cook algorithm
  8. toom-handed
  9. Tooma
  10. toombah
  11. toombahs

Source and license

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