Wiktionary

gam

See also: Appendix:Variations of "gam"

English

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Pronunciation

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Etymology 1

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

Noun

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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 2

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

Noun

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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 […]
Translations
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Verb

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

  1. (nautical, ambitransitive) 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.

References

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  1. ^ “gam”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
  2. ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2025) “gams”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
  3. ^ “gam”, in OED Online  ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.

See also

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Anagrams

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Acehnese

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Noun

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gam

  1. boy

References

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Bandjalang

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Noun

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gam

  1. (Wahlubal) hair of the head

Synonyms

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Catalan

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Etymology

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From gamar-se.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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gam m (plural gams)

  1. a wasting diseases, particularly distomatosis
    Synonym: gamadura

Further reading

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Danish

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Etymology

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From Old Danish gam, from Old Norse gammr, gambr. Cognate with Old High German gampilun, gabilun (“a fablelike creature”).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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gam c (singular definite gammen, plural indefinite gamme)

  1. (obsolete) a vulture or condor; scavenging birds living in Africa, Europe, Asia and America
  2. (obsolete, rare) a griffin

Declension

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Declension of gam
common
gender 		singular plural
indefinite definite indefinite definite
nominative gam gammen gamme gammene
genitive gams gammens gammes gammenes

References

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Galo

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Etymology

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From Assamese [Term?].

Noun

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gam

  1. village headman

Garo

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Noun

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gam

  1. stuff

Hausa

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Etymology

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Borrowed from English gum.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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gâm m

  1. glue, paste

Middle English

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Noun

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gam

  1. Alternative form of game

Old Irish

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From Proto-Celtic *gyemos.

Noun

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gam (gender unknown)

  1. winter, winter storm

Derived terms

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Mutation

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Mutation of gam
radical lenition nasalization
gam gam
pronounced with /ɣ(ʲ)-/ 		ngam

Note: Certain mutated forms of some words can never occur in Old Irish.
All possible mutated forms are displayed for convenience.

Further reading

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Scots

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Etymology

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The etymology of the original meaning of tooth is unclear but the later senses probably developed by conflation with the English word gum, which has a similar sound and also refers to a part of the lower mouth.

Noun

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gam

  1. A tooth.
  2. The lower part of the face, consisting of the mouth, lips and jaw.
  3. A blowjob.

Further reading

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Scottish Gaelic

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Etymology

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

Pronoun

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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 notes

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  • 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.
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Sumerian

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Romanization

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gam

  1. Romanization of 𒃵 (gam)

Swedish

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Etymology

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From Old Norse gammr.

Noun

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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
    (please add an English translation of this usage example)

Declension

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Declension of gam
nominative genitive
singular indefinite gam gams
definite gamen gamens
plural indefinite gamar gamars
definite gamarna gamarnas

Ternate

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Etymology

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

Pronunciation

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Noun

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gam

  1. Alternative form of gamu

References

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

Turkish

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Etymology

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From Arabic غَمّ (ḡamm).

Noun

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gam (definite accusative gamı, plural gamlar)

  1. sorrow

See also

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Vietnamese

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Vietnamese Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia vi

Pronunciation

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Etymology 1

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Borrowed from French gramme.

Alternative forms

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Noun

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gam

  1. gram (unit of mass)

Etymology 2

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Borrowed from French gamme.

Noun

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gam

  1. (music) musical scale
    Synonym: âm giai

Volapük

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Noun

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gam (nominative plural gams)

  1. bride, groom

Declension

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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 terms

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Zazaki

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Noun

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gam

  1. step
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