Origin obscure and uncertain. Possibly from the English dialectal (North Midlands) adjectivegame(“lame”),Welshcam(“crooked”), or fromIrishcam(“bent”), by way ofShelta. Compare alsoOld Occitangambi(“lame, limping”), related toOld Occitangamba(“leg”) (see alsoFrenchjambe(“leg”), Englishgam(“leg”)).
gammy (comparativegammier,superlativegammiest)
- Injured, or notfunctioningproperly (with respect to legs).
- Synonym:lame
I have got agammy leg, and can't walk far.
1950,Norman Lindsay,Dust or Polish?, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page165:"With thatgammy leg I wouldn't risk a bet against the chance of another accident on those stairs."
- 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 agammy 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, page31:I'm not exactly spectacular at the moment with agammy knee that sometimes lets me down and hair that looks as if it's been cut with a knife and fork.
- (slang, obsolete)Fake;counterfeit.
1891,The Gentleman's Magazine, volume270, page389: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.
- (slang, obsolete) Bad; unfavourable.
- John Camden Hotten (1873),The Slang Dictionary "Gammy, bad, unfavourable, poor tempered. Those householders who are known enemies to the street folk and tramps are pronounced by them to be gammy."
Abbreviation +-y.
gammy (pluralgammies)
- (colloquial)Grandmother.
Had our belovedgammy lost it?
gam +-y
gammy (pluralgammys)
- (Scotland, slang, vulgar) Ablowjob;fellatio.
