glom

verb \ ˈgläm \

Updated on: 12 Apr 2018

Definition of glom

glommed; glomming

transitive verb

1 : take, steal

2 : seize, catch

— glom on to

: to grab hold of : appropriate to oneself

glommed on to her ideas

See glom defined for English-language learners

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Examples of glom in a Sentence

the manager glommed the shoplifter just as she was about to bolt out of the store

Recent Examples of glom from the Web

And in the aftermath, animal advocates and concerned lawmakers glommed on to a shocking piece of data.

— martine powers, chicagotribune.com, "More dogs die on United than on any other airline. Here's why.," 6 Apr. 2018
Meanwhile, companies like Nest have continued to glom on to mainstream social movements, simply in more subtle forms.

— julianne tveten, The New Republic, "How corporate America has commodified the protest movements of the Trump era," 4 Apr. 2018
And in the aftermath, animal advocates and concerned lawmakers glommed on to a shocking piece of data.

— martine powers, Washington Post, "More dogs die on United than on any other airline. Here’s why.," 4 Apr. 2018
The three, all GOP targets this fall, have glommed on to the issue with gusto.

— chris stirewalt, Fox News, "Tariffs give endangered Dems an out," 7 Mar. 2018
Lately, a growing number of conservatives have glommed onto another policy.

— robinson meyer, The Atlantic, "Climate Policy Can Help Avert Modern Liberalism’s “Doom Loop”," 26 Oct. 2017
The New Republic was associated with FDR’s New Dealers in the 1940s; Time magazine, at its founding, spoke to the rising business class of the 1920s; more recently, Breitbart glommed onto Trump’s rise.

— WSJ, "Notable & Quotable: What Is Verrit?," 8 Sep. 2017
Clearly, then, for actual rain to fall, a million teeny droplets have to glom together into a larger unit.

— sam kean, The Atlantic, "The Chemist Who Thought He Could Harness Hurricanes," 5 Sep. 2017
But the strangest, and right now scariest, trick the ants have is their ability to glom together into giant floating rafts composed of up to 500,000 wriggling critters to survive floods.

— jason daley, Smithsonian, "Another Danger of the Harvey Flood: Floating Fire Ants," 29 Aug. 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'glom.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

It's a classic case of glomming: Americans seized on glaum (a term from Scots dialect that basically means "grab") and appropriated it as our own, changing it to glom in the process. Glom first meant "steal" (as in the purse-snatching, robber kind of stealing), but over time that meaning got stretched. Today, glom often figuratively extends that original "steal" sense. A busy professional might glom a weekend getaway, for example. Glom also appears frequently in the phrase glom on to, which can mean "to appropriate for one's own use" ("glom on to another's idea"); "to grab hold of" ("glom on to the last cookie"); or "to latch on to" ("glom on to an opinion" or "glom on to an influential friend").