Example of a gizmo; a P-38 can opener, issued with US military canned rations from 1942 to the 1980s.
14 April 2025
Gizmo is a generic, slang name for an object. If you want to refer to something and don’t have a name for it at hand, it is a gizmo. The term is of unknown origin, but very probably is a nonsense coinage. It arises in US Marine Corps slang in the lead up to World War II.
The earliest use of the term that I’m aware of is as a pseudonym for a correspondent in the Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck. It is spelled Gismo in the August 1938 issue and Gizmo in October 1938.
And the earliest use in the sense of an object without a name is again from Leatherneck, this time from the May 1939 issue:
Butch Nyden has returned to us from Shanghai, where he found out that Gin Rickey’s aint [sic] them two wheel gismos you ride in out there.
Gizmo had made its way into US Army slang two years later, when Henry Levy, a reporter for the Los Angeles Citizen-News who had been drafted into the Army, wrote of his experiences for the paper on 8 May 1941:
Oddest of all words is “gizmo,” pronounced “gizz-mow.” This is an all-purpose word, always utilized as a noun. A “gizmo” means everything and anything. An example, a soldier asks another lend him his bayonet. “Lend me your gizmo,” he says. Or, “Boy, what a gizmo,” referring to a beautiful new car streaking by.
And by August 1942, civilians were using the word. From North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer of 24 August 1942:
The Waltonbike is here.
For want of a better name, we christen the vehicle thusly—but to many it may still be a hickey, bejadel, thingamaijig or gizmo—but to its designer it’s the answer to tire and gasoline rationing.
Stacy Walton, well-known Jacksonville citizen who operates his father’s store five miles from town, during his spare time has rigged up his vehicle out of parts of a man’s and woman’s bicycle, a water pump motor, and a friction drive pulley that rests against the rear tire, and, which actually works.
Sources:
Gismo. “Company D, First Battalion.” Leatherneck, 21.8, August 1938, 54/2. Archive.org.
Gizmo. “‘Dog’ Company Dope.” Leatherneck, 21.10, October 1938, 28/2. Archive.org.
Goranson, Stephen. “‘Gizmo’ 1938, ~August and October.” ADS-L, 19 April 2017.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. gizmo, n.
Levy, Henry J. “Private Henry Finds Army Like Sideshow.” Citizen-News (Los Angeles), 8 May 1941, 10. Newspapers.com.
Looey. “Motor Transport.” Leatherneck, 22.5, May 1939, 35/2. Archive.org.
“New Bicycle Makes Debut” (23 August 1942). Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), 24 August 1942, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gizmo, n.