Qualm
noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A feeling of apprehension, doubt, fear etc.
"[W]ho vvould not rather Sleep Quietly upon a Hammock, vvithout either Cares in his Head, or Crudities in his Stomach, then lye Carking upon a Bed of State, vvith the Qualms and Tvvinges that accompany Surfeits and Exceſs?"
- 2 uneasiness about the fitness of an action (particularly for reasons of ethics, morals or propriety) wordnet
- 3 A sudden sickly feeling; queasiness.
- 4 a mild state of nausea wordnet
- 5 A prick of the conscience; a moral scruple, a pang of guilt.
"This lawyer has no qualms about saving people who are on the wrong side of the law."
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- 6 Mortality; plague; pestilence. UK, archaic, dialectal
- 7 A calamity or disaster. UK, archaic, dialectal
- 1 To have a sickly feeling. intransitive
Example
More examples"He did not have any qualm of conscience."
Etymology
Perhaps from Middle English qualm, cwalm (“death, sickness, plague”), which is from Old English cwealm (West Saxon: "death, disaster, plague"), ūtcwalm (Anglian: "utter destruction"), from Proto-West Germanic *kwalm (“killing, death, destruction”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷelH- (“to stick, pierce; pain, injury, death”), whence also quell. Although the sense development is possible, this has the problem that there are no attestations in intermediate senses before the appearance of "pang of apprehension, etc." in the 16th century. The alternative etymology is from Dutch kwalm or German Qualm (“steam, vapor, mist”) earlier “daze, stupefaction”, which is from the root of German quellen (“to stream, well up”). The sense “feeling of faintness” is from 1530; “uneasiness, doubt” from 1553; “scruple of conscience” from 1649.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.