Other forms: swarms, swarming, swarmed
A swarm is a thick moving cloud of insects. A swarm of bees, a swarm of midges, the swarm settled.
A bee swarm is a colony leaving to found a new nest, with the old queen and about half the workers, and it is a natural process rather than an attack. Locust swarms can cover hundreds of square kilometres. As a verb, swarm means to move in a crowd — people swarmed onto the pitch — and swarming with means covered in. Note swarm intelligence, a real field in robotics and biology.
1nounswarmA thick moving cloud of insects.
“A swarm of bees flew out of the hollow tree.”
2verbmoveTo move in a large crowd.
“People swarmed onto the pitch before the whistle.”
swarm is a moving mass.
Old English swearm comes from a root meaning to buzz or hum — the same source as the Latin susurrus, a whisper. A swarm is named for its noise rather than its number.
Middle English
swarm
English, today
swarm
From Middle English swarm. From Middle English swarm, from Old English swearm (“swarm, multitude”), from Proto-West Germanic swarm, from Proto-Germanic swarmaz (“swarm, dizziness”), from Proto-Indo-European swer- (“to buzz, hum”). Cognate with stq Swoorm (“swarm”), Dutch zwerm, German Schwarm, Danish sværm, Swedish svärm, Icelandic svarmur (“tumult, swarm”), Latin susurrus (“whispering, humming”), Lithuanian surma (“a pipe”), Russian свире́ль (“a pipe, reed”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Nature & Weather, Insects & Sea Life