spam
Pluralspams
Pluralspams
- 1A canned cooked meat made mainly from ham, sold in rectangular cans.
He sliced the spam and added it to the rice.
Many island households keep a few cans of spam in the pantry.
Note
This is the original sense, and the name began as a trademark. Geo. A. Hormel & Co. registered it in the US in 1937, and it is presumed to blend "spiced ham" or "shoulder of pork and ham." It was soon extended to other kinds of canned meat. Hormel spells the trademark in capitals, SPAM, so the lowercase spelling marks the generic use.
- 2Unwanted bulk electronic messages sent to large numbers of recipients who did not request them.
The filter moved most of the spam into a separate folder.
Companies that send spam can face heavy fines.
Similarjunk
Oppositeham
Note
It works mostly as a mass noun: people get too much spam, not too many spams, though the plural sometimes counts individual messages. Junk mail is its closest synonym, and The Economist in 2013 grouped junk mail of "the physical and electronic varieties" together. Wanted mail has its own name, ham, a pun that only makes sense because of the canned meat.
- 3To send unsolicited electronic messages to a particular person or organization.
Marketers spam customers with offers they never signed up for.
He spammed the entire department with promotional emails.
Similarbombard, flood, inundate, deluge
Note
The object is the receiver, whether a single person, a company, or a whole mailing list, and the material sent follows with: spam customers with offers. What makes it spam is that nobody asked for it. Compare the flooding sense, where the messages may be wanted or sincere and the problem is only how many arrive.
- 4To send unsolicited electronic messages, especially in large quantities.
Accounts that spam repeatedly tend to get suspended.
She kept spamming until the moderators stepped in.
Note
The activity without a stated target: accounts that spam, a bot that keeps spamming. Add an object and you have the transitive use. The verb was already current on Usenet in 1993. Joel Furr, writing on March 31 of that year, describes a runaway program that "proceeded to spam news.admin.policy" with about 200 messages. The verb doubles its m: spamming, spammed.
- 5To send messages over and over, often causing disruption by flooding a channel or person.
Angry fans spammed the studio's inbox with complaints.
When players spam in the group chat, others lose track of the conversation.
Similarflood, bombard, inundate, swamp, deluge
Note
Volume is the offense here, not commerce or consent. Fans can spam a studio with genuine complaints, and players can spam a chat with real conversation, and both still count. The verb works with or without an object: spam the channel, or simply spam in it. Its closest plain synonym is flood, which captures the same sense of a channel overwhelmed.
- 6Excessive online messages, often unwanted and posted repeatedly.
Her notifications were buried under spam.
The group chat turned into spam after the link was shared.
Note
Here nothing needs to be sold and nothing needs to be automated. A friend who posts the same link twenty times in a group chat is producing spam in this sense. The offense is excess and repetition, not commerce, which separates it from machine-made commercial content.
- 7Unwanted electronic material of any kind that is churned out automatically to make money.
Search engines try to push spam down in their rankings.
The platform removes spam generated by automated accounts.
Note
The legal sense is narrower than the everyday one. The Spam Control Act (Cap. 311A, revised edition 2008) limits the word to unsolicited commercial communications sent in bulk by email, or by text or multimedia message to mobile numbers. Ordinary use stretches it to any machine-made commercial content, including promotional posts and filler pages. Compared with bulk messages, the test here is automation for profit, not delivery to an inbox, and the noun stays uncountable.
- 8To perform an action rapidly and repeatedly, especially in a video game.
She spammed her strongest move until the boss finally fell.
Beginners often spam attacks instead of timing them carefully.
Similarmash
Note
A gamer's verb, stretched from the inbox to the controller. Its object is the input itself, such as a key, a button or a special attack, rather than the person on the receiving end. Tone depends on context. As a tip it is neutral (spam the Z key for a speed boost). As a complaint it suggests a player leaning on one move instead of playing with timing.
Spam the jump button to climb the wall faster.
He kept spamming the same combo and lost every round.
- 9A large quantity of something done repetitively, or regarded as unusually repetitive.
The final boss fight devolved into pure spam from both players.
Reviewers complained that the game rewards spam over genuine skill.
Similarrepetition
Note
Video games carried the word from inboxes to repetition of any kind. In games, spam is the same move or input used over and over. Calling a tactic spam is a judgment: it implies the repetition is indiscriminate and takes the place of skill. The noun pairs naturally with the rapid-repetition verb, so players who spam an attack produce spam.
- 10Ellipsis of spam account.
He keeps a spam for venting where his family won't see it.
Most of her unfiltered thoughts go on her spam, away from public view.
Note
This clipping of spam account can mislead readers who know only the junk-mail sense. A spam is a second, private social media account, chiefly on Instagram, where someone posts raw, personal content away from a polished main feed. It is countable: she has a spam, he posts it on his spam. Spam account in the literal sense can still mean an account that sends junk, so context decides which is meant.
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Origin
The original sense, a canned ham, was a proprietary name registered by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in the U.S. in 1937, presumed to be a conflation of either "spiced ham" or "shoulder of pork and ham." The use for unwanted email derives from a 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch in which Vikings repeatedly chant "spam"; the earliest recorded real-life use in this sense is around 1993, though the word appears earlier in the 1980s in relation to multi-user computer games (MUDs).