gab
nounverbattested in dialogue
- //ɡæb//
Idle chatter.
noun
- 1
Idle chatter.
Ah, find some chirk in ye, lad. Now is the time for gab and chatter. Y’best be enjoying it. Come a fortnight and the brace of us’ll be wantin’ to be ever silent as the tomb. Even to clap eyes on each other... It’ll make y’hotter than hell!
- 2
The mouth or gob.
- 3
One of the open-forked ends of rods controlling reversing in early steam engines.
Loose eccentric reversing gear gave way about 1836 to the early forms of gab motion. [...] In 1840 Stephenson evolved a motion in which the gabs were connected directly to the valve spindle.
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English gab, gabbe, from Old Norse gabb (“jest, mockery”) (whence also Old French gab, gap (“mockery, derision, scorn”)). Cognate with Icelandic gabb (“hoax”).
verb
- 1
obsoleteTo jest; to tell lies in jest; exaggerate; lie.
He would chant his own doughty deeds, and “gab,” as the Norman word was, in painful earnest, while they gabbed only in sport, and outvied each other in impossible fanfaronades”
- 2
To talk or chatter a lot, usually on trivial subjects.
"That Mrs. Mender gives a bloke the ear-ache; thinks a bloke's got all day to waste listening to her gab."
- 3
obsoleteTo speak or tell falsely.
Etymology
From Middle English gabben, from Old English gabban (“to scoff, mock, delude, jest”) and Old Norse gabba (“to mock, make sport of”); both from Proto-Germanic *gabbōną (“to mock, jest”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰeh₁bʰ- (“to be split, be forked, gape”). Cognate with Scots gab (“to mock, prate”), North Frisian gabben (“to jest, sport”), Middle Dutch gabben (“to mock”), Middle Low German gabben (“to jest, have fun”).
Forms
- plural
- gabs
- past tense
- gabbed
- past participle
- gabbed
- present participle
- gabbing
- third person singular
- gabs