yam

plural yams

1. Any climbing vine of the genus Dioscorea in the Eastern and Western hemispheres, usually cultivated.
2. The edible, starchy, tuberous root of that plant, a tropical staple food.

   Inwardly Okonkwo knew that the boys were still too young to understand fully the difficult art of preparing seed-yams. But he thought that one could not begin too early. Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.

   1958 June 17, Chinua Achebe, chapter 4, in Things Fall Apart, New York, N.Y.: Astor-Honor, published 1959, →OCLC, part 1, page 34

3. USA sweet potato; a tuber from the species Ipomoea batatas.
4. ScotlandA potato.
5. New ZealandAn oca; a tuber from the species Oxalis tuberosa.
6. MalaysiaSingaporeTaro.
7. An orange-brown colour, like the flesh of the yam.

plural yams

1. regionalCumberlandHome.

1. pronunciation spellingPronunciation spelling of am.

   “Stay, jailer, stay, and hear my woe,” repeating again and again, very softly, the line at the end of each stanza, “I am not mad, I am not mad.” Except she sang it: “I yam not mad, I yam not mad.”

   1904, Carrie Hunt Latta, “The Last Day of Schol”, in The Reader Magazine, volume IV, Indianopolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, page 291

present singular third person yams · participle present yamming · participle past yammed · past yammed

1. UKslangTo eat.

   “If I was that snake I’d just open my jaw and yam that fool up in one bite!”

   2016, Zadie Smith, Swing Time, New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, →ISBN, page 78

present singular third person yams · participle present yamming · participle past yammed · past yammed

1. especiallyball gamesTo dunk on; to beat humiliatingly.

   For quotations using this term, see Citations:yam.

plural Yams

1. A surname.

plural Yams

1. historicalperson from Western or Southern Finland; Tavastian

   [...] they, doubtless, belong to the great Yam division of the Ugrian population, a division which contained the aborigines not only of St. Petersburg but of Novogorod as well — of St. Petersburg and Novogorod as well as much besides.

   1878, Robert Gordon Latham, Russian and Turk: From a Geographical, Ethnological, and Historical Point of View, London, page 253