gam
English
editPronunciation
edit- IPA(key): /ɡæm/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - Rhymes: -æm
Etymology 1
editFrom Italian gamba (“leg”).[1] Doublet of gamb, gamba, jamb, and jambe.
Noun
editgam (plural gams)
- (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
editUncertain but surely formed within English; etymons may include game or gammon.[3]
Noun
editgam (plural gams)
- 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.
- (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
editVerb
editgam (third-person singular simple present gams, present participle gamming, simple past and past participle gammed)
- (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, […]
- (US, dialect) To engage in social intercourse anywhere.
References
edit- ^ “gam”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
- ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “gams”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
- ^ “gam”, in OED Online , Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
See also
editAnagrams
editAcehnese
editNoun
editgam
References
edit- 2007. The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Department of Linguistics.
Bandjalang
editNoun
editgam
- (Wahlubal) hair of the head
Synonyms
editCatalan
editEtymology
editFrom gamar-se.
Pronunciation
edit- Rhymes: -am
Noun
editgam m (plural gams)
- a wasting diseases, particularly distomatosis
- Synonym: gamadura
Further reading
edit- “gam” in Diccionari de la llengua catalana, segona edició, Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
Galo
editEtymology
editFrom Assamese [Term?].
Noun
editgam
Garo
editNoun
editgam
Hausa
editEtymology
editPronunciation
editNoun
editgâm m
Lashi
editPronunciation
editClassifier
editgam
References
edit- Hkaw Luk (2017) A grammatical sketch of Lacid[1], Chiang Mai: Payap University (master thesis)
Middle English
editNoun
editgam
- Alternative form of game
Old Irish
editAlternative forms
editEtymology
editFrom Proto-Celtic *gyemos.
Noun
editgam (gender unknown)
Derived terms
editMutation
editOld 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 reading
edit- Gregory Toner, Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, Dagmar Wodtko, editors (2019), “gaim”, in eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language
Scots
editEtymology
editThe 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
editgam
- A tooth.
- The lower part of the face, consisting of the mouth, lips and jaw.
- A blowjob.
- For quotations using this term, see Citations:gam.
Further reading
edit- “gam” in the Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries.
Scottish Gaelic
editEtymology
editContraction of aig + mo (at my) or aig + am (at their)
Pronoun
editgam
- me (direct object)
- A bheil thu gam chluinntinn? - Do you hear me?
- them (direct object)
- Cha robh i gam faicinn. - She didn't see them.
Usage notes
edit- 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 terms
editSumerian
editRomanization
editgam
- Romanization of 𒃵 (gam)
Swedish
editEtymology
editNoun
editgam c
- a vulture or condor; scavenging birds living in Africa, Europe, Asia and America
- (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
editDeclension of gam | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Singular | Plural | |||
Indefinite | Definite | Indefinite | Definite | |
Nominative | gam | gamen | gamar | gamarna |
Genitive | gams | gamens | gamars | gamarnas |
Ternate
editEtymology
editFrom the older gamu, with word-final vowel deletion.
Pronunciation
editNoun
editgam
- Alternative form of gamu
References
edit- Rika Hayami-Allen (2001) A descriptive study of the language of Ternate, the northern Moluccas, Indonesia, University of Pittsburgh, page 29
Turkish
editEtymology
editNoun
editgam (definite accusative gamı, plural gamlar)
See also
editVietnamese
editEtymology
editPronunciation
editNoun
editgam
- gram (unit of mass)
Volapük
editNoun
editgam (nominative plural gams)
Declension
editDerived terms
editZazaki
editNoun
editgam
- English 1-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio links
- Rhymes:English/æm
- Rhymes:English/æm/1 syllable
- English terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *kh₂em-
- English terms derived from Latin
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- Acehnese lemmas
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- ace:Children
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- Rhymes:Catalan/am/1 syllable
- Catalan lemmas
- Catalan nouns
- Catalan countable nouns
- Catalan masculine nouns
- ca:Pathology
- Galo terms borrowed from Assamese
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- Galo lemmas
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- adl:People
- Garo lemmas
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- ha:Materials
- Lashi terms with IPA pronunciation
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- Middle English lemmas
- Middle English nouns
- Old Irish terms inherited from Proto-Celtic
- Old Irish terms derived from Proto-Celtic
- Old Irish lemmas
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- sv:Birds
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- tft:Polities
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