promn.
/prɒm/, U.S. /prɑm/ colloquial.
1. Originally U.S. A ball or formal dance at a school or college, typically held for the members of a single (typically senior) class near the end of the school year.
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society > leisure > dancing > ball or dance > [noun] > other balls or dances
carolc1300
buttock-ball1698
redoubt1698
ridotto1708
race ball1770
county ball1771
dress ball?1772
promenade1778
waltz1802
hunt ball1807
dignity ball1834
ball-royala1843
polkery1845
jigging-party1872
prom1879
Cinderella dance1883
dinner dance1887
white ball1891
cotillion1898
taxi dance1910
Stampede Dance1950
go-go1965
1879 Yale Courant in Crimson (Harvard Univ.) 5 Dec. 69/2 Full many a dollar have they,..Which neither the Ball Club nor the Boat Club nor the Junior Prom. Com..nor the Lit. nor the News..can from their pockets tear.
1890 Harvard Crimson 1 Dec. 3/2 T. L. McClung is chairman of the ‘Prom’ committee at Yale.
1899 A. H. Quinn Pennsylvania Stories 170 All you children can get tickets of me for the Senior Prom right now.
1924 P. Marks Plastic Age 136 No freshman was allowed to attend the Prom.
1956 ‘B. Holiday’ & W. Dufty Lady sings Blues viii. 89 We were playing big towns and little towns, proms and fairs.
1972 T. P. McMahon Issue of Bishop's Blood (1973) vii. 88 A girl..who went into a decline because she hadn't been invited to the Junior Prom at Santa Clara University.
2001 R. B. Parker Death in Paradise (2002) xix. 85 I needed a date for senior prom.
2. Chiefly British. Usually with capital initial. = promenade concert n. at promenade n. Compounds 2; spec. (chiefly in plural. The Proms) any one of the series of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts now performed annually at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
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society > leisure > the arts > music > performing music > a performance > [noun] > concert > types of
Philharmonic concert1740
benefit-concert1759
chamber concert1760
recital1762
Dutch concert1774
concert performance1777
philharmonica1796
musical soirée1821
sacred concert1832
soirée musicale1836
promenade concert1839
pianoforte recital1840
ballad concert1855
piano recital1855
Monday pop1862
Pop1862
promenade1864
popular1865
Schubertiad1869
recitative1873
organ recital1877
pop concert1880
smoker1887
smoke concert1888
café concert1891
prom1902
smoke-ho1918
smoking-concert1934
hootenanny1940
opry1940
Liederabend1958
1902 Free Lance 4 Jan. 358/1 There is never one of the programmes at the Proms..unworthy of the..most cultured music lover.
1930 Daily Express 8 Sept. 6/2 Faces are certainly funny things—as you remarked when we went to the ‘Prom.’ at the Queen's Hall the other night.
1958 Times 20 June 3/6 This year is Puccini's centenary and, for the first time in a Prom, a whole act from one of his operas is included.
1975 Australian 4 Feb. 3 Prof Boskovsky will conduct the first of the 1975 proms at Sydney Town Hall on Saturday.
1992 Classic CD 25 May 11/4 The 5,000 or so people who heard its UK première at the Proms in 1990 seemed to like it a lot.
3. A place for promenading; = promenade n. 2a.
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society > travel > means of travel > route or way > way, path, or track > path or place for walking > [noun] > promenade > by the sea
marine1615
promenade1648
front1766
marina1798
prom1909
1909 J. A. Glover-Kind I do like to be beside Seaside (song) I do like to stroll up on the Prom, Prom, Prom.
1910 Bradshaw's Railway Guide Apr. 1142/2 Charmingly situated on the West Prom., directly facing the Sea.
1925 Glasgow Herald 18 July 8/7 A scrap of conversation overheard on the ‘prom’ of a well-known resort.
1973 P. Lovesey Mad Hatter's Holiday i. 7 A long parade of freshly-arrived visitors taking that first bracing turn along the prom.
2005 Dunoon Observer & Argyllshire Standard 15 July 9/2 We noticed quite a few eyesores... An empty paddling pool crying out for some use... The patched prom and scruffy toilets.
Compounds
C1.
a. (In sense 1.)
prom dress n.
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1923 Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana) 5 June 14 (advt.) Prom dresses. At the Prom, the new dress must have every admiring daintiness and beauty.
1976 National Observer (U.S.) 26 June 17/4 Prom dresses, cheers, put-downs, yearbook inscriptions... We remember them all.
2006 Daily Tel. 29 Mar. 24/1 ‘Vintage’ is a teal taffetta prom-dress, with an embroidered bodice and full skirt.
prom girl n.
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1894 Outing 24 68/2 For two days..in January the room is crowded with ‘Prom’ girls and their escorts.
1922 F. S. Fitzgerald Beautiful & Damned i. ii. 49 The outer signs of the cut-and-dried Yale prom girl and all that—but different.
2003 Washington Times (Electronic ed.) 3 Nov. She's not the sweet, innocent prom girl he created.
b. (In sense 2.)
prom concert n.
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1903 Times 5 Nov. 1/2 (advt.) Crystal Palace. Prom. Concert. Today at 6.0.
1973 ‘S. Harvester’ Corner of Playground ii. iii. 93 She had queued to see ballet at Covent Garden, gone to Prom concerts, visited art galleries.
2004 Canberra Times (Australia) (Nexis) 9 Dec. a2 There will be another annual prom concert in the grounds of Government House in February.
c. (In senses 1 and 2.)
prom-goer n.
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1934 Arlington Heights (Illinois) Herald 1 June 1/3 The prom goers will dance in the high school gym.
1947 Penguin Music Mag. 2 37 There is one body of Prom-goers who..are seen and heard too much,..a source of continual irritation to the serious Promenader.
1996 Independent 28 Aug. i3 This man is the hottest conductor in the world... So why aren't Prom-goers snapping up seats to see him?
2002 Salina (Kansas) Jrnl. 21 Apr. b3/3 After-prom is an organized activity for prom-goers that takes place after the official prom is over.
prom night n.
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1905 N.Y. Times 22 Feb. 7/4 (heading) ‘Prom’ night at Princeton.
1964 Times 22 Aug. 10/5 (headline) A rewarding prom night.
1997 Total Film Sept. 18/2 He ditched his girlfriend and vanished with no explanation on prom night.
C2.
prom king n. U.S. a male student chosen or (more usually) elected to have honoured status at a prom; (also in extended use) a man likened to a prom king, esp. in being popular, attractive, shallow, vain, etc.
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1922 Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin) 30 May 4/3 Their partners as the ten most handsome men are..Dale Merrick, prom king of 1921.
1991 S. Schepps Encino Man (film script) (O.E.D. Archive) 4 There's no way you are going to the prom, you're a disease. Face it, you'll never be prom king.
2005 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 14 Apr. c19/2 Back when Alex Rodriguez was baseball's prom king as the most popular and most talented and most photogenic of all players.
prom queen n. originally and chiefly U.S. a female student chosen or (more usually) elected to have honoured status at a prom; (also in extended use) a woman likened to a prom queen, esp. in being popular, attractive, shallow, vain, etc.
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1920 Chicago Sunday Tribune 8 Feb. (Rotogravure section) 13 (caption) Ms. Deidre Cox of Chicago has been chosen ‘prom queen’, to lead the grand march.
1985 Washington Post (Nexis) 9 June f1 There've been relentless personal attacks calling her a ‘prom queen’, ‘an airhead’, and things like that.
1998 R. L. Fleming She's All That (film script, revised) (O.E.D. Archive) 25 Next month she's gonna be Prom Queen. All the girls want to be her. All the guys want to nail her.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, June 2007; most recently modified version published online June 2022).
> as lemmas
PROM
PROM n. (also prom) Computing programmable read-only memory (read-only memory to which data can be written, but only once); cf. ROM n.3
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society > computing and information technology > hardware > [noun] > primary storage or main memory > read-only
ROM1966
EAROM1970
PROM1973
EPROM1977
1973 Jrnl. Electrochem. Soc. 120 1001 (heading) Reliability of NiCr ‘fusible link’ used in PROM's.
2003 EDN (Nexis) 12 June 38 Applications that load configuration data from either an embedded processor or a co-resident PROM can optimize the configuration process to further reduce the load time.
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n.1879as lemmas