Homonyms, Etymologically Speaking: J

Many words have two meanings, sometimes more, which are often very different. Such words have identical spelling and pronunciation, they are known as homonyms. Here I continue an A to Z list of such words and look at how that word came to have two different meanings.

J is for jam, be it a fruit preserve, or in the sense of wedged, tightly packed, or even in the musical sense. Taking these in order, the preserve is has only been known as 'jam' since around 1730, this almost certainly from the method of production in crushing the fruit. As a verb it has only been seen since 1716, but likely comes from the Old English cham 'to bite, gnash' and still seen in English (albeit probably only preserved by classic comics) 'chomp'.

Other uses such as the jamming of machinery, seen since 1851; the jamming of radio signals, since 1914; and to play impromptu music from 1935.