gam

See also: Appendix:Variations of "gam"

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɡæm/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æm

Etymology 1

From Italian gamba (“leg”). Doublet of gamb, gamba, jamb, and jambe.

Noun

gam (plural gams)

2. (slang) A person's leg, especially an attractive woman's leg.
   • 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

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

Noun

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

group of whales

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 鯨魚群／鲸鱼群 (jīng yú qún)

• Esperanto: balenaro
• Finnish: parvi (fi)
• Slovak: kŕdeľ veľrýb m

Verb

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.

See also

• gam gam

Anagrams

• MGA, GMA, Mag., AMG, gma, MAG, AGM, Mag, mag-, mag

Acehnese

Noun

gam

1. boy

References

• 2007. The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Department of Linguistics.

Bandjalang

Noun

gam

1. (Wahlubal) hair of the head

Synonyms

• guhndun

Catalan

Etymology

From gamar-se.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -am

Noun

gam m (plural gams)

1. a wasting diseases, particularly distomatosis

   Synonym: gamadura

Further reading

• “gam” in Diccionari de la llengua catalana, segona edició, Institut d’Estudis Catalans.

Galo

Etymology

From Assamese [Term?].

Noun

gam

1. village headman

Garo

Noun

gam

1. stuff

Hausa

Etymology

Borrowed from English gum.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɡâm/
  • (Standard Kano Hausa) IPA^(key): [ɡâŋ]

Noun

gâm m

1. glue, paste

Lashi

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɡam/

Classifier

gam

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

References

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

Middle English

Noun

gam

1. Alternative form of game

Old Irish

Alternative forms

• gaim, gem

Etymology

From Proto-Celtic *gyemos.

Noun

gam (gender unknown)

1. winter, winter storm

Derived terms

• gaimred

Mutation

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

• Gregory Toner, Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, Dagmar Wodtko, editors (2019), “gaim”, in eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language

Scots

Etymology

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

gam

1. A tooth.
2. The lower part of the face, consisting of the mouth, lips and jaw.
3. A blowjob.
   • For quotations using this term, see Citations:gam.

Further reading

• “gam”, in The Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004–present, →OCLC.

Scottish Gaelic

Etymology

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

Pronoun

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

• 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

• ga
• gad
• gan
• gar
• gur
• iad
• mi

Sumerian

Romanization

gam

1. Romanization of 𒃵 (gam)

Swedish

Etymology

From Old Norse gammr.

Noun

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

Declension of gam

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

Ternate

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): [ˈɡam]

Noun

gam

1. Alternative form of gamu

References

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

Turkish

Etymology

From Arabic غَمّ (ḡamm).

Noun

gam (definite accusative gamı, plural gamlar)

1. sorrow

See also

• envâ-ı gam
• kaygılar

Vietnamese

Pronunciation

• (Hà Nội) IPA^(key): [ɣaːm˧˧]
• (Huế) IPA^(key): [ɣaːm˧˧]
• (Saigon) IPA^(key): [ɣaːm˧˧]

Etymology 1

Borrowed from French gramme.

Alternative forms

• cà ram
• cờ ram
• gờ ram

Noun

gam

1. gram (unit of mass)

Etymology 2

Borrowed from French gamme.

Noun

gam

1. (music) musical scale

   Synonym: âm giai

Volapük

Noun

gam (nominative plural gams)

1. bride, groom

Declension

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

• higam
• jigam

Zazaki

Noun

gam

1. step