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Definition of glom
glommed
;glomming
glom on to
: to grab hold of : appropriate to oneself glommed on to her ideas
From the M-W Editors
glom was our Word of the Day on 12/16/2013. Hear the podcast!
Theme music by Joshua Stamper ©2006 New Jerusalem Music/ASCAP
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
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In experiments, the device was able to glom on to objects in the lab and even floating items within the International Space Station.
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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.
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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.
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If there is no news, just glom onto something tiny.
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Would there really be so much frenzied activity if investigators and intelligence professionals had nothing to glom on to?
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This means that exploits and malware won't be able to glom onto your computer, and complex applications will install and uninstall cleanly without leaving detritus on your system long after you're done with the program.
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Minute droplets of fog condense in the tiny holes of the mesh, which glom together into drops large enough to drip down the fibers.
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Just released this morning, the budget for fiscal year 2012 creates a separate funding line, the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, that gloms together cash for the State Department, the military and USAID.
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").
Origin and Etymology of glom
alteration of English dialect glaum to grab
GLOM Defined for English Language Learners
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