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''gander'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250819014104-00-⌔

gander - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

gander (plural ganders)

  • A male goose.
    • ✤ * Ganders and geese are at their best for stock from two to ten years old. They live to a great age—it is stated to thirty or more years—but after ten years they cannot be reckoned upon as reliable assets on a farm. Two years old is the best age to mate them, making up pens of a gander and two or three geese at the New Year. It is difficult sometimes to distinguish ganders from geese. A practical man is, however, rarely mistaken.*1
    • ✤ Old Mother Goose/When she wanted to wander/Would ride through the air/On a very fine gander.2
    • ✤ Marta’s gander was a magnificent snow-white bird: the object of terror to foxes, children and dogs. She had reared him as a gosling; and whenever he approached, he would let fly a low contented burble and sidle his neck around her thighs.3
  • A fool, simpleton.
  • (informal) A glance, look.
    • ✤ Have a gander at what he’s written.
    • ✤ I took a gander and she seemed so familiar.
    • ✤ As well as the church and its sexton, the market house is worth a gander, while the hop fields and orchards are “reminding one of Kent”, for we are in another “Garden of England”.4
  • (US) A man living apart from his wife.

Verb

gander (third-person singular simple present ganders, present participle gandering, simple past and past participle gandered)

  • (dialect, intransitive) to ramble, wander

Etymology

From Middle English gandre, from Old English gandra, ganra (“gander”), from Proto-West Germanic ﹡ganʀō, from Proto-Germanic ﹡ganzô (“gander”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡ǵʰh₂éns (“goose”). The meaning “a look” is derived from the image of craning one’s neck like a goose. The meaning’a man apart from his wife’ is derived from a concept of a grass widower, and of calling a husband a goose.5

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /ˈɡæn.də(ɹ)/
  • (General American) IPA: /ˈɡæn.dɚ/
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ændə(ɹ)

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1902, Lewis Wright, “Geese and Swans”, in The New Book of Poultry […], London; […]: Cassell and Company, Limited, page 560, column 1: ↩

  2. 1916, Blanche Fisher Wright, The Original Mother Goose: ↩

  3. 1988, Bruce Chatwin, Utz, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN; republished London: Vintage Books, 2005, →ISBN, page 50: ↩

  4. 2022 August 24, Stephen Roberts, “Bradshaw’s Britain: the Cotswold Line: Ledbury”, in RAIL, number 964, page 61: ↩

  5. Jonathon Green Green’s Dictionary of Slang https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/pqkormi. ↩

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