Definition of "gam"
gam1
noun
plural gams
(slang) A person's leg, especially an attractive woman's leg.
Quotations
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.
2012 September 10, Ariel Levy, “The Space In Between”, in The New Yorker
gam2
noun
plural gams
Collective noun used to refer to a group of whales, or rarely also of porpoises; a pod.
Quotations
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.
1862, Henry Theodore Cheever, The Whalemen's Adventures in the Southern Ocean, Darton & Hodge, page 116
(by extension) A social gathering of whalers (whaling ships).
Quotations
But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word, Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it. Gam. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews, the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.
1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 53”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley
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 […]
2007, Tom Chaffin, Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah, page 230
verb
third-person singular simple present gams, present participle gamming, simple past and past participle gammed
(nautical, transitive, intransitive) To pay a social visit on another ship at sea.
Quotations
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.
2008, Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, page 436