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''gigolo'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250819013837-00-⌔

gigolo - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

gigolo (plural gigolos)

• A man funded by women who find him attractive, particularly
  • ✤ How’s the, uh, gigolo campaign going?¹
  • (dated) A hired escort or dancing partner.
    • ✤ I’m just a gigolo/And everywhere I go/People know the part I’m playin’/Paid for every dance/Sellin’ each romance/Ooh, what they’re sayin’²
  • A male prostitute with female clients.
    • ✤ Synonyms: see Thesaurus: gigolo

Verb

gigolo (third-person singular simple presentgigoloes or gigolos, present participle gigoloing, simple past and past participle gigoloed)

• (intransitive) To work or act as a gigolo.
  • ✤ He says he worked at one thing and another, whatever he could get, but near as I can figure out he was mostly gigoloing, and not finding too many heavy-money dames.³
  • ✤ Since my arrival I’d lost seventeen pounds. What with gigoloing all night, working all day, worrying myself flaming sick, I’d had enough.⁴
  • ✤ ‘ […] [He was s]electing paintings to be forged, supplying canvases and materials, scripting out the fake papers, while you gigoloed with every woman in town and beyond, getting them to paint or deal or buy these fricking pieces, these masterfully detailed fakes!’⁵
• (transitive) To provide (someone) with the services of a gigolo.
  • ✤ He sat down at my table in an outdoor trattoria to gigolo me and promptly forgot his lines and went blank.⁶
  • ✤ The beach wasn’t crowded yet, and as far as I could tell, there were no gigolos or women waiting to be gigoloed.⁷
• (transitive, reflexive) To offer (oneself or someone else) to someone as a gigolo.
  • ✤ It might be a joke on the rest of the world; it was also a joke on himself, that he had gigoloed himself to such scurfy stuff.⁸
  • ✤ What would have happened just then I do not know, if Mr. Vertigo had not appeared with the family collie, whom he had gigoloed to Carl Schurz Park.⁹

Etymology

First attested in English in 1922.¹⁰ From French gigolo (“young lover kept by an older woman”), first attested in that sense in 1904 (attested since 1850 in the sense “Amant de cœur, compagnon d’une gigolette ”, and since 1894 in the sense “elegant young man whose means of livelihood are dubious”),¹¹¹² a back-formation from gigolette (“promiscuous dancing girl, girl available for hire as a dancing partner”),¹³ attested since 1850, from giguer (“to dance”), from gigue (“fiddle; type of dance; jig”). More at jig.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA: /ˈd͡ʒɪɡ.ə.loʊ/¹⁴¹⁵ or/ˈʒɪɡ.ə.loʊ/¹⁶¹⁷
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈd͡ʒɪɡ.ə.ləʊ/¹⁸¹⁵ or/ˈʒɪɡ.ə.ləʊ/¹⁹²⁰
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Hyphenation: gig‧o‧lo

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

1. 1972, Jay Presson Allen, Cabaret, spoken by Brian Roberts (Michael York): ↩

2. 1929, “Just a Gigolo”, Irving Caesar (lyrics), Leonello Casucci (music): ↩

3. 1933, Dashiel Hammett, chapter 11, in The Thin Man ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

4. 1988, John Grant (as Jonathan Gash), chapter 30, in Jade Woman ‎${}^{[2]}$, page 221: ↩

5. 2009, Amrita Chowdhury, Faking It ‎${}^{[3]}$, page 286: ↩

6. 1982, Tom McHale, chapter 20, in Dear Friends ‎${}^{[4]}$, page 217: ↩

7. 2008, Liz Tuccillo, How to Be Single ‎${}^{[5]}$, page 247: ↩

8. 1931, Samuel Roth, chapter 21, in The Private Life of Frank Harris ‎${}^{[6]}$, page 257: ↩

9. 1968, MacKinlay Kantor, The Day I Met a Lion ‎${}^{[7]}$, page 33: ↩

10. “gigolo”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present. ↩

11. “gigolo”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012 ↩

12. Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français (Larousse Références, →ISBN, page 339. ↩

13. “gigolo”, in Collins English Dictionary, 2011–present. ↩

14. Macmillan American English Dictionary, online ↩

15. Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, online ↩ ↩²

16. Collins American English Dictionary, online ↩

17. “gigolo”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present. ↩

18. Macmillan British English Dictionary, online ↩

19. “gigolo”, in Collins English Dictionary, 2011–present. ↩

20. Harrap’s Shorter Dictionary, 8th Edition, page 389 ↩

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