☼ Concept Map

''spume'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260817185222-00-⌔

spume - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

spume (countable and uncountable, plural spumes)

  • Foam or froth of liquid, particularly that of seawater.
    • ✤ Materials dark and crude,/Of spiritous and fiery spume.1
    • ✤ No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;/This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath/For the fiend’s glowing hoof - to see the wrath/Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.2
    • ✤ The desert storm was riding in its strength; the travellers lay beneath the mastery of the fell simoom. […] Roaring, leaping, pouncing, the tempest raged about the wanderers, drowning and blotting out their forms with sandy spume.3
    • ✤ Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost.4
    • ✤ The village itself is built on a ridge above the harbour, rows of sturdy cottages over which spume is hurled by easterly gales.5
    • ✤ A strong sea wind lashed at his city suit, salt rain stung his eyes, balls of spume skimmed across his path.6

Verb

spume (third-person singular simple present spumes, present participle spuming, simple past and past participle spumed)

  • To froth.

Etymology

From Middle English spume, from Old French espume, from Latin spūma.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /spjuːm/
  • Audio (Canada): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -uːm

Printed 2026-08-17.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1667, John Milton, “Book VI”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a] nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a] nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XIX: ↩

  3. 1892, James Yoxall, chapter 5, in The Lonely Pyramid: ↩

  4. 1906 May–October, Jack London, chapter I, in White Fang, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., published October 1906, →OCLC, part 1 (The Wild): ↩

  5. 1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 337, about St Abbs: ↩

  6. 1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy: ↩