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sperm

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//spɜːm//
  • United States//spɜɹm//

The reproductive cell or gamete of the male; a spermatozoon.

noun

  1. 1

    The reproductive cell or gamete of the male; a spermatozoon.

    In the Fall into the division of labor, Levi-Strauss sees the great hunters trading women to create the exogamous bonds of one hunting band with another. The egg is, but the sperm does. The tiny sperm may be furious in its activity, but its highway to the egg is paved by the alkaline trail set down by the Great Mother.

    Seeing the two little moving cells – the result of her egg and Luke's sperm – was incredible, and two very long weeks later the clinic confirmed I was pregnant.

    “Female may accept the sperms of male that can catapult but deplete the sperms of male that can be easily caught by her,” he said.

    However, in some men precum will contain sperm so adequate protection should be used to prevent pregnancy.

  2. 2

    slangSemen; the generative substance of male animals.

    Other Nations there are, that never have use of fire; Others, whose sperme is of a blacke colour.

    Deer sperm was in used among the Romans as an aphrodisiac.

  3. 3

    Sperm oil; whale oil from a sperm whale; spermaceti.

    Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he made assurance of Lucy’s coffin.

Etymology

From Middle English sperme, from Latin sperma, from Ancient Greek σπέρμα (spérma, “seed, semen”). Compare also Old French esperme, sparme.

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo ejaculate.

  2. 2

    slangTo ejaculate on or into.

Forms

plural
sperms
past tense
spermed
past participle
spermed
present participle
sperming
third person singular
sperms
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).