gab

plural gabs

1. countableuncountableIdle chatter.

   Ah, find some chirk in ye, lad. Now is the time for gab and chatter. Y’best be enjoying it. Come a fortnight and the brace of us’ll be wantin’ to be ever silent as the tomb. Even to clap eyes on each other... It’ll make y’hotter than hell!

   2019, Robert Eggers, Max Eggers, The Lighthouse (motion picture), spoken by Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), set in Maine, United States, during the 1890s with dialogue written to reflect the time period

2. countableuncountableThe mouth or gob.
3. countableuncountableOne of the open-forked ends of rods controlling reversing in early steam engines.

   Loose eccentric reversing gear gave way about 1836 to the early forms of gab motion. [...] In 1840 Stephenson evolved a motion in which the gabs were connected directly to the valve spindle.

   1940 July, S. Richards, “Locomotive Valve gear Development”, in Railway Magazine, page 412

present singular third person gabs · participle present gabbing · participle past gabbed · past gabbed

1. intransitiveobsoleteTo jest; to tell lies in jest; exaggerate; lie.

   He would chant his own doughty deeds, and “gab,” as the Norman word was, in painful earnest, while they gabbed only in sport, and outvied each other in impossible fanfaronades”

   1866, Charles Kingsley, chapter 12, in Hereward the Wake, London: Nelson, page 181

2. intransitiveTo talk or chatter a lot, usually on trivial subjects.

   "That Mrs. Mender gives a bloke the ear-ache; thinks a bloke's got all day to waste listening to her gab."

   1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 26

3. obsoletetransitiveTo speak or tell falsely.

plural GABs

1. abbreviationcountableinitialismuncountablehuman sciencesInitialism of gender-atypical behavior.

1. A diminutive of the male given name Gabriel.