gam

noun

1. (dated, slang)A person's leg, especially an attractive woman's leg.

   “Make the salesclerk blush by flashing some gam and asking him to mix a bucket in your flesh tone.”

   “The women's-liberation movement of the late sixties and the seventies – the so-called second wave of feminism – introduced Americans to the notion that their mothers and sisters and daughters ought not to be "objectified": that there was something wrong with reducing female people to boobs, gams, and beaver.”

2. Collective noun used to refer to a group of whales, or rarely also of porpoises; a pod.

   “Upon getting into a "gam" of whales, this boat, together with that of one of the mates, pulled for a single whale that was seen at a distance from the others, and succeeded in getting square up to their victim unperceived.”

   “Breakfast was interrupted as a gam of porpoises surrounded the Argyle, swaying in the foam and singing in gurgles and beeps.”

   “Christmas day in 1998, we lived on the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Grove, California and watched a gam of whales breaching in the deep ultramarine water.”

3. (broadly)A social gathering of whalers (whaling ships).

   “There is still that yearning for news from Nantucket that there was when the whale-ships stopped for a gam out in the far-distant Pacific Ocean […]”

   “If time was available, whaling prospects poor, and the weather gentle, a gam might last all day and include tea and dinner.”

   “Twice each year, the Russian Navy sent out such ships to provision Russian whalers in the Sea of Okhotsk. In sailing toward the supposed Russian ship, the Abigail’s captain, Ebenezer Nye, was hoping for a gam with the ship's officers […]”

4. (abbreviation, alt-of)Abbreviation of gynandromorph.

verb

1. (ambitransitive)To pay a social visit on another ship at sea.

   “Although most whalemen looked forward to gamming and enjoyed these ocean-borne gatherings, there were at least a few whalemen who either grew weary of them, or just weary of gamming so often with the same ships over and over.”

   “This was early in the summer of 1820, after nearly a year at sea, and they had gammed the whaling ship Aurora, which had on board not only plenty of letters but some newspapers as well.”

   “In chapter 2 we saw how gamming whalers sang songs that tied them to their homelands while emphasizing the transient, cosmopolitan nature of their work, […]”

2. (US, dialectal)To engage in social intercourse anywhere.