came
The stained-glass artisan's lead came came by UPS.
The sentence reports that a stained-glass artisan's grooved lead strip arrived by UPS delivery.
Meanings (pronounced /keɪm/)
a slender H-shaped lead strip used by stained-glass artisans to hold the individual pieces of glass in place
- The restorer carefully measured each came before cutting it to length.
- Lead came has been used in church windows for over a thousand years.
the past tense of 'come' — to have moved toward or arrived at a place
- She came home late last night.
- The package came earlier than expected.
Word origin
Two unrelated words sharing a modern spelling: 'came' the past-tense verb is from Old English cuom, the past tense of cuman ('to come'), from Proto-Germanic *kwemaną. 'Came' the noun (a lead strip used to hold stained-glass panes) is from an obscure 16th-century Scottish or Northern English word of unclear origin, possibly related to 'comb' through a sense of grooved or toothed.
Fun fact
'Came' the lead strip is a craft term most people have never encountered. Stained-glass artisans use it daily; everyone else uses 'came' only as the past of 'come.' The two words have lived parallel lives for five hundred years without crossing paths — except in sentences like this one.