Other forms: calming, calmed, calms
Calm means quiet and untroubled — a calm sea, a calm voice, staying calm when everything is going wrong. It describes both the outside world and the inside one, and the two senses reinforce each other.
It is an adjective, a noun and a verb without changing shape: keep calm, the calm before the storm, calm down. The l is silent in careful British English — KAHM — which learners often do not expect from the spelling. Calm down is the phrasal verb everyone meets first, and it is worth noting that telling somebody to calm down has almost never in recorded history caused anybody to calm down. Compare quiet, which is about sound, and still, which is about movement.
1adjectivecalmNot worried or excited.~41%
“She stayed calm while everyone else panicked.”
synonyms: composed, relaxed, unruffled
2adjectiveweatherOf weather or the sea, still and without wind.~2%
“The water was completely calm at that hour.”
3verbupsetTo make somebody less upset or excited.~49%
“It took twenty minutes to calm him down.”
4nounperiodA period of quiet and stillness.~8%
“There was a strange calm after the announcement.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
calm is a state of stillness.
Also accepted in games: relaxed, peaceful
The word came through French and Italian from Greek kauma, the heat of the midday sun — the hour when the wind drops and nothing moves. The sea being calm and the day being too hot to work were the same fact, and English kept the stillness and dropped the heat.
Ancient Greek
καῦμα — heat, especially of the sun
Latin
cauma — heat of the midday sun
roa-oit
calma
Middle French
calme
Middle English
calm
English, today
calm
Built from
From Middle English calm, calme, from Middle French calme, probably from roa-oit calma, of unknown origin. calma may derive from Latin cauma (“heat of the midday sun”), from Ancient Greek καῦμα (“heat, especially of the sun”), from καίω (“to burn”), or possibly from Latin caleō. Compare also lng, chalma (“frozenness”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic kalmaz (“frozenness, cold”). Displaced native smilte from smylte.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA