''gall'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260824130621-00-⌔

gall - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

gall (countable and uncountable, plural galls)

• (uncountable) Impudence or brazenness; temerity; chutzpah.
  • ✤ “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.¹
  • ✤ Prichard, while keeping school, had the unmitigated gall to teach Greek, although he had never studied the subject.²
  • ✤ In July 1938, that was sufficient to call down contempt and hatred on us, and brand us as men of unmitigated gall.³
  • ✤ 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.⁴
  • ✤ “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.”⁵
• (anatomy, archaic, countable) A gallbladder.
  • ✤ He shall flee from the iron weapon and the bow of steel shall strike him through. It is drawn and cometh out of the body; yea, the glittering sword cometh out of his gall.⁶
• (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.
• (figurative, uncountable) Great misery or physical suffering, likened to the bitterest - tasting of substances.
  • ✤ Lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood;⁷
  • ✤ The stage its ancient fury thus let fall,/And comedy diverted without gall.⁸
  • ✤ […] I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall […]⁹

Noun

gall (countable and uncountable, plural galls)

• (countable) A sore on a horse caused by an ill- fitted or ill- adjusted saddle; a saddle sore.
  • ✤ Riding a horse with bruised or broken skin can cause a gall, which frequently results in the white saddle marks seen on the withers and backs of some horses.¹⁰
• (pathology, countable) A sore or open wound caused by chafing, which may become infected, as with a blister.
  • ✤ And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,/And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;¹¹
• (figurative, uncountable) A feeling of exasperation.
  • ✤ Thou ſhalt be leader of this thouſand horſe,
    Whoſe foming galle with rage and high diſdaine,
    Haue ſworne the death of wicked Tamburlaine.¹²
  • ✤ It moves my gall to hear a preacher descanting on dress and needle-work; and still more, to hear him address the British fair, the fairest of the fair, as if they had only feelings.¹³
  • ✤ He’s sure got a lotta gall/To be so useless and all/Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall¹⁴
• (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.

Verb

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

• (ergative) To chafe, to rub or subject to friction; to create a sore on the skin.
  • ✤ […] 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.¹⁵
  • ✤ I heard him curse his own misery, while he hugged the chains that galled him:¹⁶
  • ✤ But, alas! the heart once bruised and galled recovers itself but slowly, and it was many minutes before the softest words the eloquent lover could shape to sound sufficed to dry those burning tears, […].¹⁷
  • ✤ 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!¹⁸
  • ✤ 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.¹⁹
• (transitive, figurative) To bother or trouble.
  • ✤ It is as lack of breath or bread: life hath no grief more galling.²⁰
  • ✤ 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.²¹
• (transitive, figurative) To harass, to harry, often with the intent to cause injury.
  • ✤ 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.²²
  • ✤ However he had concealed it from the eyes of others, the haughty ire of Margaret must have galled him in his deepest soul.¹⁷
  • ✤ 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.²³
• (transitive, figurative) To exasperate.
  • ✤ Synonym: rankle
  • ✤ Metrinko was hungry, but he was galled by how self-congratulatory his captors seemed, how generous and noble and proudly Islamic.²⁴
• (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.
• (intransitive, obsolete, rare) To scoff; to jeer.
  • ✤ I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel²⁵

Noun

gall (plural galls)

• (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).
  • ✤ 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.²⁶
• A bump -like imperfection resembling a gall.
  • ✤ 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.²⁷

Verb

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

• (transitive) To impregnate with a decoction of gallnuts in dyeing.
  • ✤ Raw silk is not galled, it is dyed at once in the black without any preparation: the liquor should be hot²⁸

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ɡɔːl/
• (Standard Southern British, Australia, New Zealand) IPA: /ɡoːl/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (US)
  • (without the cot–caught merger) IPA: /ɡɔl/
  • (cot–caught merger) IPA: /ɡɑl/
• (Scotland) IPA: /ɡɔl/

Etymology 1

From Middle English galle, from Old English ġealla, galla,²⁹ 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.²⁹

Etymology 2

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”).

Etymology 3

From Middle English galle, from Old French galle, from Latin galla (“oak-apple”).³⁰³¹

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Footnotes

1. 1917, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter 6, in The Oakdale Affair ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

2. 1891, Exercises of class day of the senior class, Tuesday, June 23, 1891, page 33: ↩

3. 1944, Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace, page 55: ↩

4. 1962, How to live with a calculating cat, page 47: ↩

5. 2022 October 18, Placeholder McD, “SCP-7579 [offset 1]”, in SCP Foundation ‎${}^{[2]}$, archived from the original on 20 December 2024: ↩

6. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Job 20:24–25: ↩

7. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Deuteronomy 29:18: ↩

8. 1683, John Dryden, The Art of Poetry: ↩

9. 1847 December, Ellis Bell [pseudonym; Emily Brontë], chapter XIV, in Wuthering Heights: […], volume, London: Thomas Cautley Newby, […], →OCLC: ↩

10. 1989 National Ag Safety Database (Centers for Disease Control) ↩

11. 1892, Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, in Leaves of Grass […], Philadelphia, Pa.: David McKay, publisher, […], →OCLC: ↩

12. c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire; London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act I, scene i: ↩

13. 1791 (date written), Mary Wollstonecraft, “Animadversions on Some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt”, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: […] J[oseph] Johnson, […], published 1792, →OCLC, page 210: ↩

14. 1966, Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”, in Blonde on Blonde: ↩

15. 1719 May 6 (Gregorian calendar), [Daniel Defoe], The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, […], London: […] W[illiam] Taylor […], →OCLC: ↩

16. 1838, Martin Farquhar Tupper, “Of Sorrow”, in Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated, London: Joseph Rickerby, […], →OCLC, page 210: ↩

17. 1843, Edward Bulwer[-]Lytton, The Last of the Barons, London; New York, N.Y.: George Routledge and Sons […], →OCLC: ↩ ↩²

18. 1907, Edward Peple, Semiramis: A Tale of Battle and of Love ‎${}^{[3]}$: ↩

19. 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XV, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC: ↩

20. 1838, Martin Farquhar Tupper, “Of Speaking”, in Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, Originally Treated, London: Joseph Rickerby, […], →OCLC, page 135: ↩

21. 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: ↩

22. 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: ↩

23. 1907, Edward Peple, Semiramis: A Tale of Battle and of Love ‎${}^{[5]}$: ↩

24. 1979 December, Mark Bowden, “Captivity Pageant”, in The Atlantic, volume 296, number 5, pages 92–97: ↩

25. 1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i]: ↩

26. 1974, Philip P. Wiener, editor, Dictionary of the History of Ideas ‎${}^{[6]}$: ↩

27. 1653, Izaak Walton, chapter 21, in The Compleat Angler ‎${}^{[7]}$: ↩

28. 1815, Thomas Cooper, A Practical Treatise on Dyeing, and Callicoe Printing: ↩

29. “gall, n.${}^1$”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000. ↩ ↩²

30. “gall”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN. ↩

31. “galle, n.(3)”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007. ↩