gimble

/ˈɡɪmbəl/

gimble verb: to grin or smile. Also the alternative form of gimbal.

Verb

gimble (third-person singular simple present gimbles, present participle gimbling, simple past and past participle gimbled)

(East-Anglia) To grin or smile.
- GIMBLE, v. to grin or smile. Though the g in this word is hard […] ][1830, Robert Forby, The Vocabulary of East Angliahttps://archive.org/details/vocabularyeasta06forbgoog, vol. II, p. 131
- […] I'd pull up at the garden-gate to take a bunch of flowers to stick in my buttonhole, and get a smile from ye that seemed to gimble itself through and through my buzzum !1842 May, John Mills, “The Stage Coach; or The Road of Life”, in The Sporting Magazine, volume 15, number 145, page 241

Also used as

gimble is also the alternative form of gimbal.

Forms of gimble

Verb
third-person singular present	gimbles
present participle	gimbling
past participle	gimbled
past	gimbled
Noun
plural	gimbles

Origin of gimble

Compared by the EDD to dialectal Swedish gimla (“to move the lips in an unseemly manner, to make a wry face, to move the lips awry”). Compare also North Frisian gēmeli (“to move the lips before laughing”). Nall compares Old English ginian; the hard g in this form needs explanation (its standard English descendant is yawn), though the EDD does record a variant form jimble (/ˈjɪmbəl/).

Variant of gimbal.

Words that rhyme with gimble

Questions about gimble

What does gimble mean?: Gimble means to grin or smile.
What part of speech is gimble?: Gimble is a verb.
How do you pronounce gimble?: Gimble is pronounced /ˈɡɪmbəl/.
What is the past tense of gimble?: The past tense of gimble is gimbled.

Words near gimble in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: gimble (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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