Word.ws English Dictionary

wem

/wɛm/

wem noun: a spot, stain, or mark; (by extension) a (moral) blemish or fault.

Noun

wem (plural wems)

  1. (UK, dialectal) A spot, stain, or mark; (by extension) a (moral) blemish or fault.
    • Smock, climbe a-pace, that I maie see my ioyes; / Oh heauen and paradize are all but toyes / Compar'd with this sight I now behould, / Which well might keepe a man from being olde. / A prettie rysing wombe without a weame / That shone as bright as anie siluer streame ...1593, Thomas Nashe, The Choice of Valentines
    • "It is even so," he added, as he gazed on the Sub-Prior with astonishment; "neither wem nor wound — not so much as a rent in his frock!"1822, sir Walter Scott (bart [novels, collected]), Historical romances of the author of Waverley, page 513

Proper noun capitalized: Wem

Wem

  1. A small market town and civil parish with a town council in north Shropshire, England (OS grid ref SJ5129).

Examples of wem in a sentence

  • The lawe of the lord is without wem, and conuertith soulis : the witnessyng of the lord is feithful, and gyueth wisdom to litle children.1846, William Maskell, Monumenta ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, page 8:
  • That "whole art" consisted in putting together about six strophes of poesy so that the words and the tune should be welded together without joint and without wem.1934, Ezra Pound, ABC of reading, page 39:

Forms of wem

pluralwems
alternative Scotlandweam
alternative Scotlandweem
alternative Scotlandwame
alternative Scotlandwan

Origin of wem

From Middle English wem, wemme, from Old English womm (“stain, spot”), from Proto-Germanic *wammaz (“stain, spot”), from Proto-Indo-European *wemh₁- (“to spew, vomit”). Cognate with Icelandic vamm (“loss, damage”), Latin vomō (“to vomit”, verb) (whence English vomit), Ancient Greek ἐμέω (eméō, “to spew”) (English emesis), Lithuanian vémti (“to vomit”), Sanskrit वमति (vamati, “to vomit”). The sense development would be "vomit" > "stain", "fault".

Recorded as Weme 1086 (Domesday Book); from Old English wamm or wemm.

Words formed from wem

Words that rhyme with wem

22 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wem

What does wem mean?
Wem means a spot, stain, or mark; (by extension) a (moral) blemish or fault.
How do you use wem in a sentence?
The lawe of the lord is without wem, and conuertith soulis : the witnessyng of the lord is feithful, and gyueth wisdom to litle children.
What part of speech is wem?
Wem can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wem?
Wem is pronounced /wɛm/.
What is the plural of wem?
The plural of wem is wems.

Words near wem in the dictionary

  1. Welwyn
  2. Welwyn Garden City
  3. Welwyn Hatfield
  4. Welz
  5. Welzes
  6. wem
  7. Wem Rural
  8. Wemale
  9. wemb
  10. Wemba Wemba
  11. Wemba-Wemba

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wem (page history and authors); Wem (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-wem.wav.

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