English

Noun

gam ‎(plural gams)

1. (slang) A person's leg, especially an attractive woman's leg.
   • 2010, Home Swell Home: Designing Your Dream Pad (ISBN 0743446356), 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 ****, gams, and beaver.

References

1. ↑ “gam” in Dictionary.com Unabridged, v1.0.1, Lexico Publishing Group, 2006.

Etymology 2

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 067154781X):

     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 0557339510), 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 examples of usage of this term, see Citations:gam.
2. (by extension) A social gathering of whalers (whaling ships).
   • 1851, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Harper and Brothers, chapter 53:

     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 the 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 0773516743), 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 0374707006), 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

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 0393066665), 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 0805067345), 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 0252096525), 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

• “gams” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary (2001).

Anagrams

• AGM
• gma
• mag

Bandjalang

Noun

gam

1. (Wahlubal) hair of the head

Synonyms

• guhndun

Hausa

Noun

gâm m

1. glue, paste

Old Irish

Etymology

From Proto-Celtic *gyemos.

Noun

gam ?

1. winter, winter storm

Inflection

This noun needs an inflection-table template.

References

• “gam” in Dictionary of the Irish Language, Royal Irish Academy, 1913–76.

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

Swedish

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

Declension

Turkish

Etymology

From Persian غم ‎(ğam).

Noun

gam ‎(definite accusative }}}, plural }}})

1. sorrow

See also

• envâ-ı gam
• kaygılar

Vietnamese

Pronunciation

• (Hà Nội) IPA^(key): [ɣaːm˧˧]
• (Huế) IPA^(key): [ɣaːm˧˧]
• (Hồ Chí Minh City) IPA^(key): [ɣaːm˧˥]

Noun

gam

1. gram (unit of mass)

Volapük

Noun

gam ‎(plural gams)

1. bride, groom

Derived terms

• higam
• jigam

Declension

Zazaki

Noun

gam

1. step