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poem

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpəʊ.ɪm//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈpʰəwɪm]/
  • United Kingdom//ˈpəʊ.əm//
  • United Kingdom//ˈpɔːɪm//
  • United States//ˈpoʊ.əm//

A literary piece written in verse.

noun

  1. 1

    A literary piece written in verse.

    Some poems, echoing the purpose of early poetic treatises on scientific principles, attempt to elucidate the mathematical concepts that underlie prime numbers. Others play with primes’ cultural associations. Still others derive their structure from mathematical patterns involving primes.

  2. 2

    A piece of writing in the tradition of poetry, an instance of poetry.

  3. 3

    A piece of poetic writing, that is with an intensity or depth of expression or inspiration greater than is usual in prose.

Etymology

From Middle French poème, from Latin poēma, from Ancient Greek ποίημα (poíēma), from ποιέω (poiéō, “to make”). Widely displaced English leed.

Forms

plural
poems
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).