Swimming is the act of moving through water by using your arms, legs, and body. Humans aren't naturally built for water like fish or dolphins are, so we have to learn techniques like freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, or butterfly to propel ourselves efficiently through pools, lakes, or oceans.

Swimming is both a survival skill and a competitive sport. For thousands of years, people have needed to swim across rivers, escape danger in water, or retrieve objects from beneath the surface. Today, swimming is also one of the world's most popular Olympic sports, where athletes race against each other or against the clock. Swimmers train for years to shave fractions of a second off their times.

The word can also describe things moving smoothly through liquid, like a submarine swimming through the ocean depths, or feeling slightly dizzy, like when your head is swimming after spinning around too many times. People might say their mind is swimming with ideas when they're thinking about many things at once.