Oom

//ʊəm// noun, phrase

noun, phrase ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An older man, especially an uncle. (Frequently as a respectful form of address.) South-Africa

    "He raised his glass. ‘Here's to you, Oom Ben,’ he said. ‘Give them hell.’"

  2. 2
    An instance of an out of memory error.
  3. 3
    Initialism of order of magnitude. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
Phrase
  1. 1
    Initialism of out of memory. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism

    "If you write infinitely recursive code, you might generate an OOM error."

  2. 2
    Initialism of out of mana. abbreviation, alt-of, initialism

Synonyms

All synonyms
order of magnitude

Example

More examples

"He raised his glass. ‘Here's to you, Oom Ben,’ he said. ‘Give them hell.’"

Etymology

Etymology 1

Borrowed from Afrikaans oom. Doublet of eam and ohm.

Etymology 2

By initialism or acronymy.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.