Gang

How to spell gang

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gang

What does gang mean?

1. nounAn organised group of people, often one involved in crime or working together on a task.
2. verbTo band together, especially to act against someone collectively.

Gang in a sentence

• noun

  Police arrested the entire gang after the warehouse raid.

• verb

  The other departments tend to gang up whenever budgets are cut.

• noun

  A gang of labourers repaired the railway line over the weekend.

• verb

  Rival shareholders began to gang together to block the merger.

Where does gang come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native Germanic word that traces back to the Old English noun 'gang', which literally meant 'a going', 'a journey', or 'a way travelled', built on the verb 'gangan', to go or walk. Related forms survive across the Germanic languages, including the Old Norse 'gangr' and the modern German 'gang', meaning a walk or course. From the idea of a 'going' came the sense of a set of things that go together, and by the 1600s it was used for a band of workers or sailors who went about a task as a unit. The modern sense of a criminal or troublemaking group emerged later, in the 1700s, narrowing the neutral 'group on the move' into something more pointed. Because the word is short, native, and phonetically regular, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable, and the only mild trap is remembering the silent-feeling but pronounced 'ng' cluster at the end.

How the word is built

• gang (Old English gang/gong: a going, a journey, hence a group that moves together)