13 October 2020
Gam is a slang term for a leg, in current usage usually referring to a woman’s leg. It comes from the French jambe (gambe in earlier dialect) and the Italian gamba, both also meaning leg, probably via nautical slang and the pidgin Mediterranean Lingua Franca. It’s recorded in English in the late eighteenth century.
The earliest English use of the word is in the form gambo and appears in Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser for 1–8 September 1781. That paper, based in Kolkata, was the first newspaper printed in Asia. It ran for two years before being shut down by the East India Company because of its criticism of the company, its provocative style, and subjects it dealt with. In this case, the paper printed a 6 January 1777 letter allegedly written by a sailor aboard the Royal Duke to a shipmate:
Ruisle [?] by the help of the Cobbler of Bones, can walk. ——As for me D—n my E—s if I e’nt Hobbling only a little tender in the Larboard side my Starboard gambo a little shattered however. I think I shall be able with little Repairs to receive your broadside.
The English word is probably borrowed from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin of various Italian dialects, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Berber, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic, that was spoken in the Mediterranean region from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries, and was also common among British sailors.
The word is recorded in Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue with the spellings of both gambs and gams:
GAMBS, thin, ill shaped legs; a corruption of the French word jambes.
SHANKS, legs, or gams.
Gamb is also a heraldic term for an animal’s leg as it appears on a coat of arms. And the French root is also the source for jamb, the side posts on a window or door. These uses are older. Heraldic use dates to the seventeenth century, and jamb for a door’s side post can be found as early as 1334.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, gam, n.1.
Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, vi, 145. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser, 1–8 September 1781, 1. British Library, Eighteenth Century Journals 3.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. jaumbe, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, s.v. gam, n.2, gamb, n.; second edition, 1989, jamb, n.