''qualm'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260727004347-00-⌔

qualm - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

qualm (plural qualms)

• A feeling of apprehension, doubt, fear etc. [from 16th c.]
  • ✤ [W]ho vvould not rather Sleep Quietly upon a Hammock, vvithout either Cares in his Head, or Crudities in his Stomach, then lye Carking upon a Bed of State, vvith the Qualms and Tvvinges that accompany Surfeits and Exceſs?¹
  • ✤ “Do you have any particular qualms about leaving Pencey?”/“Oh, I have a few qualms, all right. Sure … but not too many. Not yet, anyway. […]”²
  • ✤ Jem’s face showed brief indecision on the ethics of withholding his own dime, but his innate courtesy won and he shifted his dime to his pocket. I did likewise with no qualms.³
  • ✤ Opponents of those privatization plans hoped to use Mr. [Neil] Armstrong’s qualms as ammunition to block the White House initiatives, and they asked for more public statements.⁴
  • ✤ Questions of bad taste have hung around Dear Evan Hansen since it debuted on Broadway in 2016, though such qualms were mostly drowned out by praise for Platt ’s visceral live performance and the catchy Broadway-by-way-of-Christian-rock tunes from wunderkind songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (who are also responsible for the toe-tapping numbers from The Greatest Showman).⁵
• A sudden sickly feeling; queasiness. [from 16th c.]
• (now chiefly in the negative) A prick of the conscience; a moral scruple, a pang of guilt. [from 17th c.]
  • ✤ This lawyer has no qualms about saving people who are on the wrong side of the law.
• (archaic, UK, dialectal) Mortality; plague; pestilence.
• (archaic, UK, dialectal) A calamity or disaster.

Verb

qualm (third-person singular simple present qualms, present participle qualming, simple past and past participle qualmed)

• (intransitive) To have a sickly feeling.

Etymology

Perhaps from Middle English qualm, cwalm (“death, sickness, plague”), which is from Old English cwealm (West Saxon: “death, disaster, plague”), ūtcualm (Anglian: “utter destruction”), from Proto-West Germanic ﹡kwalm (“killing, death, destruction”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡gʷelH- (“to stick, pierce; pain, injury, death”), whence also quell. Although the sense development is possible, this has the problem that there are no attestations in intermediate senses before the appearance of “pang of apprehension, etc.” in the 16th century. The alternative etymology is from Dutch kwalm or German Qualm (“steam, vapor, mist”) earlier “daze, stupefaction”, which is from the root of German quellen (“to stream, well up”). The sense “feeling of faintness” is from 1530; “uneasiness, doubt” from 1553; “scruple of conscience” from 1649.⁶

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /kwɑːm/, /kwɔːm/
• Audio (UK): 🔊
• (General American) IPA: /kwɑ(l)m/, /kwɔ(l)m/, (obsolete)/kwæm/⁷
• Rhymes: -ɑːm, -ɔːm, -ɑːlm

Printed 2026-07-27.

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Footnotes

1. 1692, Roger L’Estrange, “[Miscellany Fables.] Fab[le] CCCLXXXIII. A Spider and the Gout[Reflexion].”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists: […], London: […] R[ichard] Sare, […], →OCLC, page 355: ↩

2. 1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 19: ↩

3. 1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC: ↩

4. 2012 August 25, Andy Pasztor, “Armstrong, first man on Moon, dies”, in The Wall Street Journal ‎${}^{[2]}$, New York, N.Y.: Dow Jones & Company, →ISSN, →OCLC: ↩

5. 2021 September 22, Caroline Siede, “Dear Evan Hansen is a misfire on just about every level”, in AV Club ‎${}^{[3]}$: ↩

6. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “qualm”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

7. Meredith, L. P. (1872), “Qualm”, in Every-Day Errors of Speech ‎${}^{[1]}$, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., page 37. ↩