Team is a noun for a group of people (or animals) working toward a shared goal, as in the sales team or a football team. Teem is a verb meaning to be full to overflowing, as in the streets teemed with shoppers. If you can swap in the word group, use team; if you mean abound or overflow, use teem.
The core difference
Team names a group working together, while teem describes being crowded or abundant.
- team — a group working or playing together: the sales team hit its target three months early.
- teem — to be full to overflowing, to abound: the market teemed with shoppers on a Saturday morning.
How to tell them apart
Team goes back to Old English, where it originally meant offspring or a set of animals harnessed together to pull a cart or plough. The modern sense of people working together as one unit grew directly out of that image of animals pulling in the same direction.
Teem has a separate, older root meaning to give birth or bring forth, which is why one of its senses is still to be prolific or to produce abundantly; from there it broadened to mean simply full to overflowing. The mix-up mostly happens because the two words sound identical when spoken, so writers default to the far more common team even when they mean overflowing or abounding.
