glom

play

verb \ ˈgläm \

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

glom was our Word of the Day on 12/16/2013. Hear the podcast!

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

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
The Rabbids show up in a time-traveling washing machine, the helmet accidentally gloms onto one of the bunch, who kicks off a rash of transmogrifications, hybridizing characters and beloved landscapes before buddying with the usual Mario villains.

— matt peckham, Time, "Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle," 28 Aug. 2017
In experiments, the device was able to glom on to objects in the lab and even floating items within the International Space Station.

— charles q. choi space.com contributor, Fox News, "Gecko-inspired robot could snag space junk," 29 June 2017
Beginning this spring, millions of bizarre primitive-seeming jellyfish-like bioluminescent sea creatures—some more than two feet long—started gumming up research nets, glomming onto fishing hooks, and cascading onto beaches along the West Coast.

— steve morey, National Geographic, "Bizarre, Glowing Sea Creatures Bloom in the Pacific," 13 June 2017
There’s talk about perhaps glomming all 12 together in some massive package this summer to avoid a government shutdown on September 30, the end of the government’s fiscal year.

— chad pergram, Fox News, "Lawmakers scramble to privatize air traffic control system, raise debt ceiling," 10 June 2017
If there is no news, just glom onto something tiny.

— brooks barnes, New York Times, "Are HGTV’s Tarek and Christina the New Brad and Jen?," 3 June 2017
Would there really be so much frenzied activity if investigators and intelligence professionals had nothing to glom on to?

— brian beutler, New Republic, "If you’re running interference for Donald Trump, you’ll eventually beclown yourself like Trey Gowdy just did.," 23 May 2017
I had been advised to get an injection of a drug to help strengthen my bones which the cancer had glommed onto, in order to reduce the risk of fracture.

— scott monserud, The Denver Post, "Help, and hope: A cancer journal," 16 May 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").