Team - teem

These homophones should not be confused. Fortunately, few students need to use teem - though many do, without realising that it is currently in effect a different word.

• A team is a group of individuals joined together. This may be for work or sport: a football team (soccer) consists of 11 players, together with reserves (and in American football, the squad may be divided into offensive and defensive teams); the army may assign a demolition team to the job of blowing up a particular installation; in business, a team may be assembled to write a strategy, or a bid. In the past, team was used mainly for a group of animals used for working together on one vehicle: a 'coach and six', for example, had a team of six horses drawing the one coach. Teams of up to eight oxen were commonly used for ploughing.
• 'To teem' is an intransitive verb which basically means 'to be abundant' or 'to have large numbers of'. A river may teem with fish; New Year sales in the shops may more often have teeming crowds; over-ripe fruit may teem with flies.

Oddly, both these spellings derive from the same word, a verb 'to team', spelled in earlier times either way, team or teem, which meant 'to bear children'. The noun meant something like 'a family', or, in animals, 'all the members of one multiple birth', as in the modern 'a litter of kittens' or of piglets: both were known as 'a team'. (Hence it came to mean a line of descendants, or family: this usage is now obsolete.) It seems clear how this meaning developed into a purposeful group of individuals, which is now invariably spelled with an '-a-':team. Another development of the word went to "To be full, as if ready to give birth; to be prolific or fertile; to abound, swarm" (OED). This is the usage which modern academic English writes with teem.