Gig

How to spell gig

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gig

What does gig mean?

1. nounA live musical performance or a booking for a band or musician to play.
2. nounA temporary or freelance piece of paid work.

Gig in a sentence

• The band played a sold-out gig at the local venue on Friday.

• She picked up a freelance gig editing reports over the weekend.

• The drummer drove two hours to make it to the evening gig.

• Delivering parcels was just a side gig to cover the rent.

Where does gig come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origin of gig is genuinely murky, and that uncertainty stretches across its several modern meanings. The oldest surviving sense, dating from the 1700s, was a light, fast, two-wheeled carriage pulled by one horse; this may relate to an older English word gig meaning something that whirls or spins, the same idea that sits behind 'whirligig'. The famous musical sense, a booking to play live, surfaced in the early twentieth century in the slang of American jazz musicians, though no one can say for certain how the carriage word came to mean a performance engagement. From there it broadened in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to mean any short-term paid job, giving us the phrase 'gig economy'. Quite separately, it became casual shorthand for 'gigabyte' in computing. Because the word is short, phonetic, and spelled exactly as it sounds, the spelling has never posed any real trap, which is rare for a word whose history is so hard to pin down.

How the word is built

• gig (single root; no prefix or suffix, a three-letter monosyllable)