gal
gal Lexical Profile
gal Game Scores & Validity
• noun
An informal or colloquial term for a girl or woman.
"She is a friendly, hardworking gal who always goes out of her way to help her neighbors."
A standard written abbreviation for gallon, a unit of liquid capacity.
"The recipe for the industrial cleaning solution calls for mixing the concentrate with 5 gal. of warm water."
A centimeter-gram-second (CGS) unit of acceleration equal to one centimeter per second squared, used primarily in geophysics and gravimetry to measure gravitational fields.
"Geophysicists measured subtle local variations in the Earth's gravitational pull down to fractions of a gal."
Word Nuance & Usage
When referring to a woman or girl, 'gal' is strictly informal and often functions as the female counterpart to 'guy'. When written with a period ('gal.'), it serves as the standard written abbreviation for the unit of liquid volume 'gallon'.
• Rhymes for gal
Word Origin & Etymology
First recorded in the late 18th century as a colloquial phonetic spelling of a dialectal pronunciation of 'girl'. The geophysical unit of acceleration is named in honor of the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).