gall - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Middle English galle, from Old English ġealla, galla,[1] from Proto-West Germanic *gallā, from Proto-Germanic *gallǭ.

The figurative senses (e.g., impudence, brazenness, chutzpah) are related to the literal sense (i.e., bile) via the lasting linguocultural effects of humorism, which governed Western medicine for many centuries before the advent of scientific medicine.

Related to Dutch gal, German Galle, Swedish galle, galla, Ancient Greek χολή (kholḗ). Also remotely related with yellow and gold.[1]

gall (countable and uncountable, plural galls)

  1. (uncountable) Impudence or brazenness; temerity; chutzpah.
    • 1917, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter 6, in The Oakdale Affair‎[1]:
      “Durn ye!” he cried. “I’ll lam ye! Get offen here. I knows ye. Yer one o’ that gang o’ bums that come here last night, an’ now you got the gall to come back beggin’ for food, eh? I’ll lam ye!” and he raised the gun to his shoulder.
    • 1891, Exercises of class day of the senior class, Tuesday, June 23, 1891, page 33:
      Prichard, while keeping school, had the unmitigated gall to teach Greek, although he had never studied the subject.
    • 1944, Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace, page 55:
      In July 1938, that was sufficient to call down contempt and hatred on us, and brand us as men of unmitigated gall.
    • 1962, How to live with a calculating cat, page 47:
      It requires the cunning of a chess master, the planning of a field marshal, the adroitness and polish of a premier of France, or, failing these, the sheer, unmitigated gall of your door-to-door salesman.
    • 2022 October 18, Placeholder McD, “SCP-7579 [offset 1]”, in SCP Foundation‎[2], archived from the original on 20 December 2024:
      "Also, as apologetic as you were for occupying my time, which I had hoped to spend with my daughter, you used about twice as many words as you needed to, and wasted an entire paragraph complaining about your colleagues. I went back to the SCP-079 file — Supervisor Valis would have had the thing decommissioned years ago if it weren't for your blatant technofetishism. Yet, you have the gall to characterize the Foundation's ongoing political interventions and military operations as squabbles."
  2. (anatomy, archaic, countable) A gallbladder.
  3. (physiology, archaic, uncountable) Bile, especially that of an animal; the greenish, profoundly bitter-tasting fluid found in bile ducts and gall bladders, structures associated with the liver.
  4. (figurative, uncountable) Great misery or physical suffering, likened to the bitterest-tasting of substances.

impudence or brazenness

From Middle English galle, from Old English gealla (“a fretted spot on the skin”), from Proto-West Germanic *gallō, from Proto-Germanic *gallô (“infirmity, swelling, lesion”).

gall (countable and uncountable, plural galls)

  1. (countable) A sore on a horse caused by an ill-fitted or ill-adjusted saddle; a saddle sore.
  2. (pathology, countable) A sore or open wound caused by chafing, which may become infected, as with a blister.
  3. (figurative, uncountable) A feeling of exasperation.
  4. (countable, technical) A pit on a surface being cut caused by the friction between the two surfaces exceeding the bond of the material at a point.

sore on a horse

pit caused on a surface caused by friction between the surfaces

gall (third-person singular simple present galls, present participle galling, simple past and past participle galled)

  1. (ergative) To chafe, to rub or subject to friction; to create a sore on the skin.
    • 1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC:
      […] he went awkwardly in these clothes at first: wearing the drawers was very awkward to him, and the sleeves of the waistcoat galled his shoulders and the inside of his arms; but a little easing them where he complained they hurt him, and using himself to them, he took to them at length very well.
    • 1838, Martin Farquhar Tupper, “Of Sorrow”, in Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated, London: Joseph Rickerby, […], →OCLC, page 210:
      I heard him curse his own misery, while he hugged the chains that galled him:
    • 1907, Edward Peple, Semiramis: A Tale of Battle and of Love‎[3]:
      Had Ninus not made offer of a high reward when Nineveh should be builded at the end of two short years? Ah, here the sandal galled!
    • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XV, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
      Edward Churchill still attended to his work in a hopeless mechanical manner like a sleep-walker who walks safely on a well-known round. But his Roman collar galled him, his cossack stifled him, his biretta was as uncomfortable as a merry-andrew's cap and bells.
  2. (transitive, figurative) To bother or trouble.
    • 1838, Martin Farquhar Tupper, “Of Speaking”, in Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated, London: Joseph Rickerby, […], →OCLC, page 135:
      It is as lack of breath or bread: life hath no grief more galling.
    • 1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, “‘Pieces of Eight’”, in Treasure Island, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC, part V (My Sea Adventure), page 219:
      I went below, and did what I could for my wound; it pained me a good deal, and still bled freely; but it was neither deep nor dangerous, nor did it greatly gall me when I used my arm.
  3. (transitive, figurative) To harass, to harry, often with the intent to cause injury.
    • 1778 June 24, George Washington, The Writings of George Washington From the Original Manuscript Sources‎[4], volume 12, archived from the original on 11 August 2014:
      The disposition for these detachments is as follows – Morgans corps, to gain the enemy’s right flank; Maxwells brigade to hang on their left. Brigadier Genl. Scott is now marching with a very respectable detachment destined to gall the enemys left flank and rear.
    • 1907, Edward Peple, Semiramis: A Tale of Battle and of Love‎[5]:
      As Bactria had pressed upon Assyria's force below, so now Prince Menon galled the Bactrians from his vantage point above, destroying them with arrows and with slings, with down-flung stones and the trunks of fallen trees.
  4. (transitive, figurative) To exasperate.
    Synonym: rankle
    • 1979 December, Mark Bowden, “Captivity Pageant”, in The Atlantic, volume 296, number 5, pages 92–97:
      Metrinko was hungry, but he was galled by how self-congratulatory his captors seemed, how generous and noble and proudly Islamic.
  5. (transitive, technical) To cause pitting on a surface being cut from the friction between the two surfaces exceeding the bond of the material at a point.
    Improper cooling and a dull milling cutter on titanium can gall the surface.
  6. (intransitive, obsolete, rare) To scoff; to jeer.

to chafe

to trouble or bother

to cause pitting on a surface

From Middle English galle, from Old French galle, from Latin galla (“oak-apple”).[2][3]

Galls on a dried leaf.

A gall on an acorn, also called knoppern

gall (plural galls)

  1. (phytopathology) A blister or tumor-like growth found on the surface of plants, caused by various pathogens, especially the burrowing of insect larvae into the living tissues, such as that of the common oak gall wasp (Cynips quercusfolii).
    • 1974, Philip P. Wiener, editor, Dictionary of the History of Ideas‎[6]:
      Even so, Redi retained a belief that in certain other cases—the origin of parasites inside the human or animal body or of grubs inside of oak galls—there must be spontaneous generation. Bit by bit the evidence grew against such views. In 1670 Jan Swammerdam, painstaking student of the insect’s life cycle, suggested that the grubs in galls were enclosed in them for the sake of nourishment and must come from insects that had inserted their semen or their eggs into the plants.
  2. A bump-like imperfection resembling a gall.
    • 1653, Izaak Walton, chapter 21, in The Compleat Angler‎[7]:
      But first for your Line. First note, that you are to take care that your hair be round and clear, and free from galls, or scabs, or frets: for a well- chosen, even, clear, round hair, of a kind of glass-colour, will prove as strong as three uneven scabby hairs that are ill-chosen, and full of galls or unevenness. You shall seldom find a black hair but it is round, but many white are flat and uneven; therefore, if you get a lock of right, round, clear, glass-colour hair, make much of it.

blister or tumor-like growth found on the surface of plants

gall (third-person singular simple present galls, present participle galling, simple past and past participle galled)

  1. (transitive) To impregnate with a decoction of gallnuts in dyeing.
    • 1815, Thomas Cooper, A Practical Treatise on Dyeing, and Callicoe Printing:
      Raw silk is not galled, it is dyed at once in the black without any preparation : the liquor should be hot
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 “gall, _n._1”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.
  2. ^ “gall”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
  3. ^ “galle, n.(3)”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.

Inherited from Latin gallus.

gall m (plural galls)

  1. rooster, cock
  2. John Dory
    Synonym: gall marí

gall (not comparable)

  1. Gallic (of or pertaining to Gaul, its people or language)

gall (countable and uncountable, plural gallok)

  1. Gaul (native or inhabitant of the historical region of Gaul, or poetically the modern nation of France)
  2. Gaulish, Gallic (language)

gall n (genitive singular galls, nominative plural göll)

  1. gall, bile
  2. bitterness, rancour

gall (strong)

  1. first-person singular past indicative of gjalla
  2. third-person singular past indicative of gjalla

From Middle Irish gall (“foreigner”), from Old Irish Gall (“a Gaul”), from Latin Gallus (“a Gaul”). Cognate with Scottish Gaelic gall and Manx goal.

gall m (genitive singular gaill, nominative plural gaill)

  1. foreigner
  2. (derogatory) Anglified Irish person

gall m (genitive singular gaill, nominative plural gaill)

  1. alternative form of gallán

Mutated forms of gall

radical lenition eclipsis
gall ghall ngall

Note: Certain mutated forms of some words can never occur in standard Modern Irish.
All possible mutated forms are displayed for convenience.

  1. ^ Finck, F. N. (1899), Die araner mundart [The Aran Dialect] (in German), Zweiter Band: Wörterbuch [Second volume: Dictionary], Marburg: Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, page 120
  2. ^ Quiggin, E. C. (1906), A Dialect of Donegal, Cambridge University Press, § 206, page 79

From Old Irish Gall (“a Gaul”), from Latin Gallus (“a Gaul”).

gall m (genitive gaill, nominative plural gaill)

  1. foreigner

Mutation of gall

radical lenition nasalization
gall gallpronounced with /ɣ(ʲ)-/ ngall

Note: Certain mutated forms of some words can never occur in Middle Irish.
All possible mutated forms are displayed for convenience.

gall m (genitive singular goill, plural goill)

  1. alternative letter-case form of Gall

gall (plural galllar)

  1. Gaul (native or inhabitant of the historical region of Gaul, or poetically the modern nation of France)

gall (comparative gallroq, superlative eng gall)

  1. Gaulish
    gall tili
    the Gaulish language

gall

  1. inflection of gallu:

    1. third-person singular present/future
    2. (literary, rare) second-person singular imperative

  2. ^ Morris Jones, John (1913), A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative, Oxford: Clarendon Press, § 51 v