Other forms: beams, beamed, beaming
A beam is the long, heavy bar that holds a building up. Black oak beams across the ceiling of an old pub, a steel beam swinging on a crane over a building site, the beam you have to duck under on a cottage staircase.
A beam is also a line of light with edges you can see: a beam of sunlight through a gap in the curtains, headlights on full beam, the beam of a torch swinging across a dark garden. That sense nearly always takes of — a beam of light, a beam of sunshine. And beam is a verb. When you beam, you smile so widely that the whole face joins in, and a parent beams at a child on stage. Television beams pictures around the world, which is the light sense stretched to fit a signal. In gymnastics, the beam is the narrow bar the gymnasts walk along.
1nounbeamA long thick bar of wood or steel that carries the weight of a building.~42%
“The ceiling is held up by four oak beams.”
2nounrayA line of light travelling in one direction.~45%
“A beam of sunlight fell across the kitchen table.”
3verbsmileTo smile very widely.~11%
“She beamed when the cake came in.”
4verbsendTo send a signal or a picture out through the air.~2%
“The final was beamed live to sixty countries.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 182 sentences found in the wild and placed 135 of them on a sense (47 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
beam is a structural support.
BEAM → a TEAM
The whole football team climbs up and stands in a row on one long bar of wood laid across the roof, red shirts against the sky. The wood takes the weight of every one of them and holds.
hooks ontoteam
Old English bēam meant tree — the living thing, standing in the ground. Dutch and German kept that job for it and still say boom and Baum for a tree, while English took the word indoors: a beam is a tree with the branches off, laid across the top of a house. The oldest meaning survives in tree names like quickbeam.
Middle English
bem
English, today
beam
From Middle English bem. From Middle English bem, beem, from Old English bēam (“tree, cross, gallows, column, pillar, wood, beam, splint, post, stock, rafter, piece of wood”), from Proto-West Germanic baum, from Proto-Germanic baumaz (“tree, beam, balk”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰew- (“to grow, swell”). Cognate with frr Boom, buum (“tree”), stq Boom (“tree”), West Frisian beam (“tree”), cim pome, póom, puam (“tree”), Dutch boom (“tree”), German Low German Boom (“tree”), German Baum (“tree”), lb Bam (“tree”), mhn pa'm (“tree”), wym baojm (“tree”), Yiddish בוים (“tree”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish bom (“beam”), Icelandic baðmur (“tree”), Gothic 𐌱𐌰𐌲𐌼𐍃 (“tree”), Albanian bimë (“a plant”). a doublet of boom.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA