wem
/wɛm/noun
wem is a noun meaning “A spot, stain, or mark; (by extension) a (moral) blemish or fault” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled W-E-M, and it appears about once in every 13 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of wem is wems.
What does wem mean?
noun
- 1
UKA spot, stain, or mark; (by extension) a (moral) blemish or fault.
"It is even so," he added, as he gazed on the Sub-Prior with astonishment; "neither wem nor wound – not so much as a rent in his frock!"
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce wem?
- /wɛm/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-wem.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of wem
- wems plural
- weam
- weem
- wame
- wan
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is wem?
Wem appears about once in every 13 million words in written English, the 106,501st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does wem come from?
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".
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).