spam
Meanings
Plural: spams
Noun
- a canned meat made largely from pork
- unwanted e-mail (usually of a commercial nature sent out in bulk)
- Unsolicited bulk electronic messages.
- Any undesired electronic content automatically generated for commercial purposes.
- Excessive, often unwanted and repeated online messages.
- Ellipsis of spam account.
- A large quantity or multitude of anything done repetitively or considered unusually or indiscriminately repetitive.
- A type of tinned meat made mainly from ham.
Verb
- send unwanted or junk e-mail
- To send spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic messages.)
- To send spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic messages) to a person or entity.
- To send messages repeatedly, often with disruptive effect; to flood.
- To do something rapidly and repeatedly.
Origin / Etymology
The original sense (canned ham) is a proprietary name registered by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in U.S., 1937. It is presumed to be a conflation of either "spiced ham" or "shoulder of pork and ham" but was soon extended to other kinds of canned meat. Hormel spells the trademarked name in all upper case.
The use for unsolicited and unwanted email derives from a Monty Python sketch (Flying Circus, Episode 25). In the 1970 sketch, a group of Vikings in a restaurant repeatedly chant the word "spam". The earliest recorded real-life use for this sense occurs around 1993 which finds reference in a newsgroup post dated March 31, 1993.
The term appears to have been used earlier in a different sense in relation to "Multi-User Dungeons" (MUDs), a kind of multi-user computer gaming environment before widespread use of the Internet, in the 1980s.
Synonyms
junk e-mail, junk mail
Antonyms
Scrabble Score: 8
spam is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordspam is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
spam is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary