Gal

How to spell gal

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gal

What does gal mean?

1. nounAn informal or colloquial word for a girl or woman.

Gal in a sentence

• The office hired a sharp young gal to run the accounts.

• He introduced her as the gal who fixed his car.

Where does gal come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is an informal variant of the word 'girl', and it dates from the early 1700s. It arose as a casual, regional pronunciation in which the vowel of 'girl' was flattened and the final consonants softened, so that the spoken form drifted toward 'gal'. Writers then began spelling it phonetically to capture that relaxed, everyday speech, which is why the word looks so simple compared with its parent. It long carried a colloquial, affectionate, sometimes rustic flavour, and that informal tone has stuck to it ever since. Quite separately, scientists later adopted the same three letters as the name of a unit of acceleration, honouring the astronomer Galileo, so the spelling has two unrelated lives.

How the word is built

• gal (a colloquial alteration of 'girl', treated as a single unanalysable root)