team [OE] The original Anglo-Saxon meaning of team was ‘the bearing of children’. From there it became ‘a brood of young animals’, and then ‘a set of draught animals working together’, which gave us the modern idea of a group of people or set of sports players in the 16th century. In the sense ‘to be full of’ teem [OE] is linked to team, but teem [ME] as in ‘teeming with rain’ is a different word altogether, which comes from Old Norse tómr ‘empty’—the original sense was ‘to drain liquid from’, the same image as in ‘its pouring with rain’.