Wiktionary

gam

See also: Appendix:Variations of "gam"

EnglishEdit

PronunciationEdit

  • IPA(key): /ɡæm/
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • Rhymes: -æm

Etymology 1Edit

From Italian gamba (“leg”).[1] Doublet of gamba, jamb, and gamb.

NounEdit

gam (plural gams)

  2. (slang) A person's leg, especially an attractive woman's leg.[2]
    • 2010, Home Swell Home: Designing Your Dream Pad, →ISBN, page 19:
      Make the salesclerk blush by flashing some gam and asking him to mix a bucket in your flesh tone.
    • 2012 September 10, Ariel Levy, “The Space In Between”, in The New Yorker:
      The women's-liberation movement of the late sixties and the seventies – the so-called second wave of feminism – introduced Americans to the notion that their mothers and sisters and daughters ought not to be "objectified": that there was something wrong with reducing female people to boobs, gams, and beaver.

Etymology 2Edit

Uncertain but surely formed within English; etymons may include game or gammon.[3]

NounEdit

gam (plural gams)

  1. Collective noun used to refer to a group of whales, or rarely also of porpoises; a pod.
    • 1862, Henry Theodore Cheever, The Whalemen's Adventures in the Southern Ocean, Darton & Hodge, page 116:
      Upon getting into a "gam" of whales, this boat, together with that of one of the mates, pulled for a single whale that was seen at a distance from the others, and succeeded in getting square up to their victim unperceived.
    • 1985, Dennis Kyte, To the Heart of a Bear: The Last Elegant Bear, →ISBN:
      Breakfast was interrupted as a gam of porpoises surrounded the Argyle, swaying in the foam and singing in gurgles and beeps.
    • 2010, Jack White, Mastery of Self Promotion, →ISBN, page 119:
      Christmas day in 1998, we lived on the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Grove, California and watched a gam of whales breaching in the deep ultramarine water.
    • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:gam.
  2. (by extension) A social gathering of whalers (whaling ships).
    • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 53”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
      But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word, Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it. Gam. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews, the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.
    • 1916, Harry B. Turner, “Nantucket's Early Telegraph Service”, in Proceedings of the Nantucket Historical Association, page 50:
      There is still that yearning for news from Nantucket that there was when the whale-ships stopped for a gam out in the far-distant Pacific Ocean […]
    • 1997, Gillies Ross; Margaret Penny, This Distant and Unsurveyed Country, →ISBN, page 14:
      If time was available, whaling prospects poor, and the weather gentle, a gam might last all day and include tea and dinner.
    • 2007, Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah, →ISBN, page 230:
      Twice each year, the Russian Navy sent out such ships to provision Russian whalers in the Sea of Okhotsk. In sailing toward the supposed Russian ship, the Abigail’s captain, Ebenezer Nye, was hoping for a gam with the ship's officers […]
TranslationsEdit

VerbEdit

gam (third-person singular simple present gams, present participle gamming, simple past and past participle gammed)

  1. (nautical, transitive, intransitive) To pay a social visit on another ship at sea.
    • 2008, Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, →ISBN, page 436:
      Although most whalemen looked forward to gamming and enjoyed these ocean-borne gatherings, there were at least a few whalemen who either grew weary of them, or just weary of gamming so often with the same ships over and over.
    • 2011, Paul Schneider, The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, →ISBN, page 255:
      This was early in the summer of 1820, after nearly a year at sea, and they had gammed the whaling ship Aurora, which had on board not only plenty of letters but some newspapers as well.
    • 2014, James Revell Carr, Hawaiian Music in Motion, →ISBN, page 181:
      In chapter 2 we saw how gamming whalers sang songs that tied them to their homelands while emphasizing the transient, cosmopolitan nature of their work, […]
  2. (US, dialect) To engage in social intercourse anywhere.

ReferencesEdit

  1. ^ “gam”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
  2. ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2023), “gams”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
  3. ^ “gam”, in OED Online  ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.

AnagramsEdit

AcehneseEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. boy

ReferencesEdit

BandjalangEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. (Wahlubal) hair of the head

SynonymsEdit

CatalanEdit

EtymologyEdit

From gamar-se.

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

gam m (plural gams)

  1. a wasting diseases, particularly distomatosis
    Synonym: gamadura

Further readingEdit

GaloEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Assamese [Term?].

NounEdit

gam

  1. village headman

GaroEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. stuff

HausaEdit

EtymologyEdit

Borrowed from English gum.

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

gâm m

  1. glue, paste

LashiEdit

PronunciationEdit

ClassifierEdit

gam

  1. classifier for a long, green plant, like a tree, grass or a flower

ReferencesEdit

  • Hkaw Luk (2017) A grammatical sketch of Lacid‎[1], Chiang Mai: Payap University (master thesis)

Middle EnglishEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. Alternative form of game

Old IrishEdit

Alternative formsEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Proto-Celtic *gyemos.

NounEdit

gam (gender unknown)

  1. winter, winter storm

Derived termsEdit

MutationEdit

Old Irish mutation
Radical Lenition Nasalization
gam gam
pronounced with /ɣ(ʲ)-/ 		ngam
Note: Some of these forms may be hypothetical. Not every
possible mutated form of every word actually occurs.

Further readingEdit

Scottish GaelicEdit

EtymologyEdit

Contraction of aig + mo (at my) or aig + am (at their)

PronounEdit

gam

  1. me (direct object)
    A bheil thu gam chluinntinn? - Do you hear me?
  2. them (direct object)
    Cha robh i gam faicinn. - She didn't see them.

Usage notesEdit

  • As me lenites the following word.
  • As them used before words beginning with b, f, m or p; otherwise gan is used.
  • Although this can be thought of as filling the function of a direct object pronoun, it is actually a form of possessive, and can therefore only be used in a periphrastic tense formed with a verbal noun, never as the object of a finite verb. Tha e gam chluinntinn is literally "he is at the hearing of me", whereby gam represents "at ... of me". With a finite verb, the genuine object pronouns would be used: Chluinn e mi he heard me, chluinn e iad, he heard them.

Related termsEdit

SumerianEdit

RomanizationEdit

gam

  1. Romanization of 𒃵 (gam)

SwedishEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Old Norse gammr.

NounEdit

gam c

  1. a vulture or condor; scavenging birds living in Africa, Europe, Asia and America
  2. (colloquial) someone who takes advantage of a demise or a bankruptcy, usually in a legal, but, for the affected people, offensive way
    Innan konkurshandlingarna ens var undertecknade samlades gamarna i verkstaden för att se vad som var värt att sälja vidare

DeclensionEdit

Declension of gam 
Singular Plural
Indefinite Definite Indefinite Definite
Nominative gam gamen gamar gamarna
Genitive gams gamens gamars gamarnas

TernateEdit

EtymologyEdit

From the older gamu, with word-final vowel deletion.

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. Alternative form of gamu

ReferencesEdit

  • Rika Hayami-Allen (2001) A descriptive study of the language of Ternate, the northern Moluccas, Indonesia, University of Pittsburgh, page 29

TurkishEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Classical Persian غم‎ (ğam).

NounEdit

gam (definite accusative gamı, plural gamlar)

  1. sorrow

See alsoEdit

VietnameseEdit

 
Vietnamese Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia vi

EtymologyEdit

Borrowed from French gramme.

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. gram (unit of mass)

VolapükEdit

NounEdit

gam (nominative plural gams)

  1. bride, groom

DeclensionEdit

declension of gam
singular plural
nominative gam gams
genitive gama gamas
dative game games
accusative gami gamis
vocative 1 o gam! o gams!
predicative 2 gamu gamus
  • 1 status as a case is disputed
  • 2 in later, non-classical Volapük only

Derived termsEdit

ZazakiEdit

NounEdit

gam

  1. step
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