gammy

English

Alternative forms

• gammie

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡæmi/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æmi

Etymology 1

Origin obscure and uncertain. Possibly from the English dialectal (North Midlands) adjective game (“lame”), Welsh cam (“crooked”), or from Irish cam (“bent”), by way of Shelta. Compare also Old Occitan gambi (“lame, limping”), related to Old Occitan gamba (“leg”) (see also French jambe (“leg”), English gam (“leg”)).

Adjective

gammy (comparative gammier, superlative gammiest)

1. Injured, or not functioning properly (with respect to legs).

   Synonym: lame

   I have got a gammy leg, and can't walk far.

   • 2005, Siobhan Roberts, John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician, in: The Guardian, July 23rd 2015

     In spring 2009, three years after he suffered a stroke that spared him intellectually but left him with a cane and a gammy right side, Conway delivered a six-part lecture series on his latest brainchild: The Free Will Theorem, devised with his Princeton colleague Simon Kochen.

   • 2009, Abigail Gordon, A Summer Wedding at Willowmere, page 31:

     I'm not exactly spectacular at the moment with a gammy knee that sometimes lets me down and hair that looks as if it's been cut with a knife and fork.

2. (slang, obsolete) Fake; counterfeit.
   • 1891, The Gentleman's Magazine, volume 270, page 389:

     A little bit of real lace would be fixed on this as in process of making, and a lot of "gammy" stuff, imitation lace, would be carried with it.

Etymology 2

Abbreviation +‎ -y.

Noun

gammy (plural gammies)

1. (colloquial) Grandmother.

   Had our beloved gammy lost it?

Scots

Etymology

gam +‎ -y

Noun

gammy (plural gammys)

1. (Scotland, slang, vulgar) A blowjob; fellatio.
   • For quotations using this term, see Citations:gammy.