Other forms: streams, streaming, streamed
A stream is a small river, narrow enough to step across in places and shallow enough to see the stones on the bottom. The one at the end of a field with a plank laid over it.
Anything flowing steadily can be a stream: a stream of traffic, a stream of visitors, a steady stream of complaints. As a verb it means to pour without stopping, so light streams through a gap in the curtains and tears stream down a face. Then there is the modern sense, which has nearly taken over — to stream a film is to play it as it arrives over the internet, and a live stream is the broadcast itself. Computing borrowed the word for data that comes in order rather than all at once. British schools stream pupils, meaning they sort them into groups by ability. And stream of consciousness is the name for writing that follows a mind's own jumps.
1nounstreamA small narrow river.~14%
“The path crosses the stream twice before the woods.”
2nouncontinuousA continuous flow of people, things or words.~55%
“A stream of taxis pulled up outside the hotel.”
3verbmoveTo flow or move steadily and without stopping.~2%
“Sunlight streamed across the kitchen floor.”
4verbplayTo play video or sound over the internet as it arrives, instead of downloading it first.~7%
“They streamed the whole concert from a phone.”
5nounliveA live broadcast sent out over the internet.~2%
“Forty thousand people watched the stream.”
6verbputTo put pupils into groups according to ability, in British use.~20%
“The school stopped streaming children at eleven.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
stream is a small watercourse.
Also accepted in games: brook
Stream is Old English strēam, from Proto-Germanic *straumaz and a Proto-Indo-European word *srowmos, a river, built on the root *srew-, to flow. Half of northern Europe still says it: German Strom, Dutch stroom, Swedish ström, Norwegian straum. The oldest idea in the word is the movement rather than the water, which is why a stream of traffic is less a metaphor than the original meaning coming back round.
Proto-Indo-European
*srew-
Middle English
strem
English, today
stream
From Middle English strem. From Middle English streem, strem, from Old English strēam, from Proto-West Germanic straum, from Proto-Germanic straumaz (“stream”), from Proto-Indo-European srowmos (“river”), from Proto-Indo-European srew- (“to flow”). a doublet of rheum. Cognate with Scots strem, streme, streym (“stream, river”), frr Stroom, struum (“stream”), West Frisian stream (“stream”), Low German Stroom (“stream”), Dutch stroom (“current, flow, stream”), German Strom (“current, stream”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål strøm (“current, stream, flow”), Norwegian Nynorsk straum (“current, stream, flow”), Swedish ström (“current, stream, flow”), Faroese streymur (“stream”), Icelandic straumur (“current, stream, torrent, flood”), Ancient Greek ῥεῦμα (“stream, flow”), Lithuanian srovė (“current, stream”) Polish strumień (“stream”), Welsh ffrwd (“stream, current”), Scottish Gaelic sruth (“stream”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA