Saturday, December 2, 2017

Interesting words: Haulm

Some of the words I write about are ones where I have some vague idea what a word means, but this is one I had never heard of before.

According to Merriam Webster, haulm is the stems and tops of crop plants such as peas or potatoes. That's not a word I'm going to use everyday, but it sounds like it might be useful for people with gardens or farms.

It's an old word, it was present in English even when English was old English.  It comes from a German word halm meaning "stem" and from earlier Latin culmus which means "stalk" and Greek kalamos meaning "reed".  It's a very rare word and it's getting rarer. Google ngram shows that it is used in about 1 in every 40,000,000 words.

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