Wem
name, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A spot, stain, or mark; (by extension) a (moral) blemish or fault. UK, dialectal
"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 ..."
- 1 A small market town and civil parish with a town council in north Shropshire, England (OS grid ref SJ5129).
Example
More examples"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 ..."
Etymology
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.
Related phrases
More for "wem"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.