---
name: "Gamy"
subtitle: "Six unrelated senses, one word — and no relation to '-gamy'"
date: 2026-07-17
link: "https://wordsmith.org/words/gamy.html"
linkText: "wordsmith.org"
source: "A.Word.A.Day"
topics: [words-and-humor, learning-and-reference]
tags: [etymology, language, wordplay]
description: "A.Word.A.Day catalogs six unrelated senses of 'gamy' — from tainted meat to plucky spirit — that Wordsmith calls a kind of lexical polygamy."
---

"Gamy" carries six senses under one roof: the flavor of game meat, meat gone slightly off, plain rank, sordid, racy, and plucky — all traced to "game," the hunted animal and the fighting spirit, first recorded in 1820. Despite the look of it, none of that connects to the "-gamy" of monogamy or bigamy, which comes from the Greek *gamos*, marriage. Wordsmith calls the pileup of meanings "a kind of lexical polygamy" — a joke the word can't actually make about itself.
