ham

pronunciation

How to pronounce ham in British English: UK [hæm] word uk audio image

How to pronounce ham in American English: US [hæm] word us audio image

Noun:

meat cut from the thigh of a hog (usually smoked)
a licensed amateur radio operator
an unskilled actor who overacts
Verb:

exaggerate one's acting

Word Origin

ham: ham: [OE] The etymological meaning of ham is ‘bend’ – it comes from Germanic *kham- ‘be crooked’ – and up until the 16th century it denoted exclusively the ‘part of the leg at the back of the knee’ (a portion of the anatomy now without a word of its own in English). Hamstring [16] reflects this original meaning. From the mid-16th century, it gradually extended semantically to ‘back of the thigh’ and hence ‘thigh’ generally, and by the 17th century it was being used for the ‘thigh of a slaughtered animal, especially a pig, preserved and used for food’. Ham in the sense ‘performer who overacts’, first recorded in the late 19th century, apparently comes from an earlier hamfatter ‘bad actor’, which may have been inspired by the Negro minstrel song ‘The Ham-fat Man’.

ham (n.1): "thigh of a hog used for food" (especially salted and cured or smoke-dried), 1630s, extended from earlier sense " part of the human leg behind the knee; hock of a quadruped," from Old English hamm "hollow or bend of the knee," from Proto-Germanic *hamma- (cognates: Old Norse höm, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch hamme, Old High German hamma), from PIE *kone-mo- "shin bone" (cognates: Greek kneme "calf of the leg," Old Irish cnaim "bone"). Ham-fisted (adj.) in reference to hard-hitting characters is from 1905; ham-handed "coarse, clumsy" is by 1896. With hammen ifalden "with folded hams" was a Middle English way of saying "kneeling."

ham (n.2): "overacting inferior performer," 1882, American English, apparently a shortening of hamfatter (1880) "actor of low grade," which is said (since at least 1889) to be from the old minstrel show song, "The Ham-fat Man" (attested by 1856). The song, a comical black-face number, has nothing to do with acting, but the connection might be with the quality of acting in minstrel shows, where the song was popular (compare the definition of hambone in the 1942 "American Thesaurus of Slang," "unconvincing blackface dialectician"). Its most popular aspect was the chorus and the performance of the line "Hoochee, kouchee, kouchee, says the ham fat man." Ham also had a sports slang sense of "incompetent pugilist" (1888), perhaps from the notion in ham-fisted. The notion of "amateurish" led to the sense of "amateur radio operator" (1919).

ham (v.): "over-act in performance," 1933, from ham (n.2). Related: Hammed; hamming. As an adjective in this sense by 1935.