jam
pronunciation
How to pronounce jam in British English:
UK [dʒæm]
How to pronounce jam in American English:
US [dʒæm]
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- Noun:
- preserve of crushed fruit
- informal terms for a difficult situation
- a dense crowd of people
- deliberate radiation or reflection of electromagnetic energy for the purpose of disrupting enemy use of electronic devices or systems
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- Verb:
- press tightly together or cram
- push down forcibly
- crush or bruise
- interfere with or prevent the reception of signals
- get stuck and immobilized
- crowd or pack to capacity
- block passage through
Word Origin
- jam
- jam: [18] The verb jam, meaning ‘press tightly together’, first appears in the early 18th century (the earliest-known unequivocal example of its transitive use is in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1719: ‘The ship stuck fast, jaum’d in between two rocks’). It is not known where it came from, but it is generally assumed to be imitative or symbolic in some way of the effort of pushing.Equally mysterious are the origins of jam the sweet substance spread on bread, which appeared around the same time. Contemporary etymologists were nonplussed (Nathan Bailey had a stab in the 1730s: ‘prob. of J’aime, i.e. I love it; as Children used to say in French formerly, when they liked any Thing’; but Dr Johnson in 1755 confessed ‘I know not whence derived’); and even today the best guess that can be made is that the word refers to the ‘jamming’ or crushing of fruit into jars.
- jam (v.)
- "to press tightly," also "to become wedged," 1706, of unknown origin, perhaps a variant of champ (v.). Of a malfunction in the moving parts of machinery, by 1851. Sense of "cause interference in radio signals" is from 1914. Related: Jammed; jamming. The adverb is recorded from 1825, from the verb.
- jam (n.1)
- "fruit preserve," 1730s, probably a special use of jam (v.) with a sense of "crush fruit into a preserve."
- jam (n.2)
- "a tight pressing between two surfaces," 1806, from jam (v.). Jazz meaning "short, free improvised passage performed by the whole band" dates from 1929, and yielded jam session (1933); but this is perhaps from jam (n.1) in sense of "something sweet, something excellent." Sense of "machine blockage" is from 1890, which probably led to the colloquial meaning "predicament, tight spot," first recorded 1914.
Example
- 1. He let her feast on the cracker with strawberry jam .
- 2. The bigger display attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam .
- 3. The heart is colored with strawberry jam , and the arrow uses cocoa powder .
- 4. Despite the traffic jam he arrived here on time .
- 5. But too many can jam up the process , leaving it locked in a vicious , harmful inflammatory cycle .