Word.ws English Dictionary

gally

gally is the archaic form of galley.

gally is the diminutive of gal.

Meaning of galley

Noun

galley (plural galleys or (obsolete) gallies)

  1. (historical) A long, slender ship propelled primarily by oars, whether having masts and sails or not; usually a rowed warship used in the Mediterranean from the 16th century until the modern era.
  2. (UK) A light, open boat used on the Thames by customhouse officers, press gangs, and also for pleasure.
  3. One of the small boats carried by a man-of-war.
  4. The cookroom or kitchen and cooking apparatus of a vessel or aircraft; sometimes on merchant vessels called the caboose.
  5. An oblong oven or muffle with a battery of retorts; a gallery furnace.
  6. An oblong tray of wood or brass, with upright sides, for holding type which has been set, or is to be made up, etc.
    • It was very nerve-racking. When I was finally able to write the story, I wrote it at the typewriter and never reread it until I had to edit the typos on the printer's galleys for the publication of the book.1976 April 26, Jil Clark, Julia Penelope, Susan Wolfe, “The Politics of Language”, in Gay Community News, page 8

See all 9 meanings of galley

Meaning of gal

Noun (1)

gal (plural gals)

  1. (colloquial) A young woman or girl; generally a form of rural Southern slang.

Noun (2)

gal (plural gals, symbol Gal)

  1. A galileo (unit of acceleration).

See all 4 meanings of gal

Adjective

gally (comparative more gally, superlative most gally)

  1. Characterised by or resembling gall; bitter.
    • For by the Dart, which is likewise a pipe, is made a deep passage into the skin, and then by the anger of the Fly, is his gally poisonous liquor injected […].1665, Robert Hooke, Micrographia, section XXV

Verb

gally (third-person singular simple present gallies, present participle gallying, simple past and past participle gallied)

  1. (UK, dialectal) To frighten, spook; to appall; to worry.
    • April 8 1700, Tom Brown, letter to Mr. Briscoe in Covent-Garden
      The next Day being Sunday, call'd by the Natives of this Country Maze Sunday, (and indeed not without some Reason, for the People look'd as if they were gallied) […]

Synonyms of gally

Forms of gally

Noun
pluralgallies
Adjective
comparativemore gally
superlativemost gally
Verb
third-person singular presentgallies
present participlegallying
past participlegallied
pastgallied

Origin of gally

From Middle English gally, from Old English gealliġ (“sour, sharp, bitter, sad”), equivalent to gall + -y.

See gallow (transitive verb).

From gal + -y.

Words formed from gally

Questions about gally

What does gally mean?
Gally means characterised by or resembling gall; bitter.
What is gally the archaic form of?
Gally is the archaic form of galley.
What part of speech is gally?
Gally can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near gally in the dictionary

  1. Galluzzo
  2. Galluzzos
  3. gallwasp
  4. gallwasps
  5. Gallwey
  6. gally
  7. gally-crow
  8. gally-crows
  9. gallybagger
  10. gallybaggers
  11. gallybeggar

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gally (page history and authors); galley (page history and authors); gal (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “gally.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gally. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.