elm

UK/ɛlm/US/ɛlm/

nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,008 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: elms

An elm is a tall hedgerow tree, once common before disease. A great elm, elm hedgerows, the elms are gone.

Dutch elm disease killed tens of millions of British trees from the 1970s, carried by a beetle, and it changed the look of the countryside within a decade. Young elms still grow from old roots and die when they reach the size the beetle prefers.

Definitions of elm

1nounelmA tall broad-leaved hedgerow tree.B2
“An old elm stood at the corner of the field.”

elm is a tree.

Where it comes from

Old English elm names the tree, from a Germanic root going back to Proto-Indo-European. Latin ulmus is a relative.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₁élem — mountain elm
Proto-Germanic
*elmaz
Proto-West Germanic
*elm
Old English
elm
Middle English
elme
English, today
elm

From Middle English elme, elm, from Old English elm, from Proto-West Germanic elm, from Proto-Germanic elmaz, from Proto-Indo-European h₁élem (“mountain elm”). See also dialectal Low German Elm, dialectal German Ilm, archaic German Ilme, Norwegian - and Swedish alm; also Irish leamh, Latin ulmus, Albanian ulzë (“maple”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Trees & Flowers

Practise this word

elm in the wild

Some individual elms reached great size and age.
Elm
Ulmus americana, generally known as the American elm or, less commonly, as the white elm or water elm, is a species of elm native to eastern North America.
Ulmus americana
The coming of beetles bearing Dutch elm disease devastated the American elm population, starting in the 1920s.
Ulmus americana
Dutch elm disease is caused by an Ascomycete fungus that kills elm trees, and is spread by elm bark beetles.
Dutch elm disease
In these regions it has devastated native and exotic populations of elms that did not have resistance to the disease.
Dutch elm disease

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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elm