gammy
/ˈɡæmi/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 2.14 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Injured, or not functioning properly (with respect to legs).
Example Sentences
- "I have got a gammy leg, and can't walk far."
- "However, I had been doing a lot of walking and my gammy leg began to give me trouble."
- ""With that gammy leg I wouldn't risk a bet against the chance of another accident on those stairs.""
- "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."
- "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."
- "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
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”)).