An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/Bemme

by Friedrich Kluge

Bemme, feminine, ‘slice of bread,’ first occurs in Modern High German; a Low German and Middle German word, a derivative of the dialectic bammen, ‘to eat,’ which may have been *bazmôn in Gothic, and is perhaps primitively allied to the Sanscrit root bhas, ‘to chew.’