teem

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /tiːm/
• Rhymes: -iːm
• Homophone: team

• Audio (UK)

  (file)

Verb

teem (third-person singular simple present teems, present participle teeming, simple past and past participle teemed)

1. To be stocked to overflowing.
   • Sir Walter Scott

     his mind teeming with schemes of future deceit to cover former villainy

2. To be prolific; to abound.
   • 2013 June 22, “Snakes and ladders”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, page 76:

     Risk is everywhere. From tabloid headlines insisting that coffee causes cancer (yesterday, of course, it cured it) to stern government warnings about alcohol and driving, the world is teeming with goblins.

3. To bring forth young, as an animal; to produce fruit, as a plant; to bear; to be pregnant; to conceive; to multiply.
   • Shakespeare

     If she must teem, / Create her child of spleen.

Verb

teem (third-person singular simple present teems, present participle teeming, simple past and past participle teemed)

1. (archaic) To empty.
   • 1849, G. C. Greenwell, A Glossary of Terms used in the Coal Trade of Northumberland and Durham

     [The banksman] also puts the full tubs to the weighing machine, and thence to the skreens, upon which he teems the coals. It is also his duty to keep an account of the quantity of coals and stones drawn each day.

   • 1913, D. H. Lawrence, “ Chapter 9 on Wikisource.Wikisource:Sons and Lovers/Chapter 9”, in Sons_and_Lovers:

     “Are you sure they’re good lodgings?” she asked.
     “Yes—yes. Only—it’s a winder when you have to pour your own tea out—an’ nobody to grouse if you team it in your saucer and sup it up. It somehow takes a’ the taste out of it.”

2. To pour (especially with rain)
3. To pour, as steel, from a melting pot; to fill, as a mould, with molten metal.

Verb

teem (third-person singular simple present teems, present participle teeming, simple past and past participle teemed)

1. (obsolete, rare) To think fit.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of G. Gifford to this entry?)