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It's a classic case of glomming: Americans seized on glaum (a term from Scots dialect that basically means “to grab”) and appropriated it as their own, changing it to glom in the process. Glom first meant “to steal” (as in the purse-snatching, robber kind of stealing), but over time that meaning got stretched to include figurative uses. Today the term is most familiar in the phrase “glom on to,” or “glom onto,” which can mean “to appropriate for one's own use,” as in “glomming on to another's idea”; “to grab hold of,” as in “glommed onto the last cookie”; “to latch on to,” as in “glom on to an opinion” or “glom onto an influential friend”; or “to become aware of,” as in “glomming onto the potential of this new technology.”
Synonyms
Examples of glom in a Sentence
Helena Andrews-Dyer, Washington Post, 25 Mar. 2024
X-Raying the Cosmos After the Big Bang, subtle density variations in the newborn universe gradually became more pronounced as matter particles glommed onto each other.
—Liz Kruesi, Quanta Magazine, 4 Mar. 2024
Crowding has made the mountain more dangerous over the past 20 years as the commercial mountaineering industry glommed onto the peak.
—Colleen Grablick, Washington Post, 22 Feb. 2024
The scene crescendos with a moment of Yueh standing before burning palm trees, an image Villeneuve glommed on to for his.
—Max Evry, WIRED, 4 Mar. 2024
Some new physics models tweak dark energy, adding a surge of cosmic acceleration in the early moments of the universe, before electrons and protons glommed onto each other.
—Quanta Magazine, 19 Jan. 2024
But in small quantities, free radicals can act as signaling molecules, Hicks says, and her lab studies show how these atoms affect a cell’s behavior by glomming on to and popping off a variety of proteins.
—Meghan Bartels, Scientific American, 17 Jan. 2024
Oxford student who gloms onto his rich classmate Felix (played by Jacob Elordi), and Pike plays Felix’s mother Elspeth, the daffy matriarch of the Saltburn estate.
—Kate Aurthur, Variety, 11 Dec. 2023
There were the summers on tour, sure, seeing the world and glomming on to the rock-star lifestyle.
—Alex Morris, Rolling Stone, 18 Sep. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'glom.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near glom
Cite this Entry
“Glom.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glom. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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