Leaven vs Barm - What's the difference?
leaven | barm |
Any agent used to make dough rise or to have a similar effect on baked goods.
(figurative) Anything that makes a general assimilating (especially a corrupting) change in the mass.
* Bible, Luke xii. 1
To add a leavening agent.
To cause to rise by fermentation.
(figuratively) To temper an action or decision.
*
To imbue; to infect; to vitiate.
* Milton
(obsolete except in dialects) Bosom, lap.
* Late 14th century': And with that word this faucon gan to crie / And swowned eft in Canacees '''barm . — Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Squire's Tale’, ''Canterbury Tales
Foam rising upon beer, or other malt liquors, when fermenting, and used as leaven in making bread and in brewing; yeast.
* 1882 , James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England , Volume 4, p. 620:
* 1913 , DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers , Penguin 2006, p. 65:
A small, flat, round individual loaf or roll of bread.
As nouns the difference between leaven and barm
is that leaven is any agent used to make dough rise or to have a similar effect on baked goods while barm is (obsolete except in dialects) bosom, lap or barm can be foam rising upon beer, or other malt liquors, when fermenting, and used as leaven in making bread and in brewing; yeast.As a verb leaven
is to add a leavening agent.leaven
English
Noun
(en noun)- Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.
Derived terms
* leavenless * natural leavenVerb
(en verb)- With fresh material, taxonomic conclusions are leavened by recognition that the material examined reflects the site it occupied; a herbarium packet gives one only a small fraction of the data desirable for sound conclusions. Herbarium material does not, indeed, allow one to extrapolate safely: what you see is what you get
- With these and the like deceivable doctrines, he leavens also his prayer.
Derived terms
* leavened * leavening * unleavenedSee also
* yeastbarm
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl) bearm .Noun
(en noun)Etymology 2
From (etyl) beorma''; related to the dialectal (Low) German ''Bärm'' ("yeast"), from Middle Low German ''barm'', ''berm''. The cake sense is possibly a shortened form of barmcake, which would be made with yeast as described in that sense, or possibly it is from the (etyl) '' , a type of cake.Noun
- (Shakespeare)
- In 1577 yeast, called barm , is bought at 9d. the pail.
- And he chaffed the women as he served them their ha'porths of barm .
