Word.ws English Dictionary

gumph

gumph noun: a foolish person; a gump.

Noun (1)

gumph (countable and uncountable, plural gumphs)

  1. A foolish person; a gump.
    • Gump, a numscull.1825, John Jamieson, Supplement to the Etymological dictionary of the Scottish language
    • Drossy saw ’em in her drawer, and for all the gumph he is, he knew the writing; and I made him get ’em for me this morning while they were at breakfast.1860, Susan Warner, Anna Bartlett Warner, Say and Seal, page 246
  2. (slang, uncountable) Nonsense.
    • Things had not been going will with Pino ever since he started to take Sister Apollonia’s bloated gumph as gospel. Thanks to the wacko, his man was actually getting a Christ complex.1998 December 15, T.C. Van Adler, St. Agatha's Breast: A Novel, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN
    • ‘It’s like listening to adolescent daughters with all their gumph and they’re going to chew you out...’2000 April, Linda Grant, Remind Me Who I Am, Again, Granta Books, New Ed edition (July), page 266

Noun (2)

gumph (uncountable)

  1. Gumption; grit.
    • Never lifted a hand to defend himself, hadn’t got any gumph.a. 1923, Violet Hunt, The Coach
    • ...anyone likely to use the book would surely have enough gumph to try both before giving up.1955, Mathematics Teaching, Association of Teachers of Mathematics

Verb

gumph (third-person singular simple present gumphs, present participle gumphing, simple past and past participle gumphed)

  1. (intransitive) To grope, especially after fish.
  2. (transitive) To catch fish by groping.

Examples of gumph in a sentence

  • He strikes me as the perfect example of an intellectual gumph.1919, St. John Greer Ervine, John Ferguson:
  • ‘ Tell them what, you gumph ? ’ cried Squibs. ‘ Are you all mad ? ’1938, George Smith, The Cornhill Magazine, page 816:
  • If Romeo were just a lovesick gumph, occasionally falling into a deeper trance in which he speaks unaccountable poetry, then Olivier is your Romeo.1971, Ronald Hayman, John Gielgud, New York: Random House:
  • Some kind of unrecognizable chart gumph; the usual mix of soul and rap.2003 June 6, Chris Wooding, Crashing, Scholastic Point, Scholastic Paperbacks (November), pages 100-101

Forms of gumph

Noun
pluralgumphs
alternative formgump
alternative formgumpf
alternative formgumpth
Verb
third-person singular presentgumphs
present participlegumphing
past participlegumphed
pastgumphed

Origin of gumph

Unknown.

Shortening of gumption.

From Scots [Term?].

Questions about gumph

What does gumph mean?
Gumph means a foolish person; a gump.
How do you use gumph in a sentence?
He strikes me as the perfect example of an intellectual gumph.
What part of speech is gumph?
Gumph can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of gumph?
The plural of gumph is gumphs.

Words near gumph in the dictionary

  1. gump-stumps
  2. Gumpert
  3. Gumperts
  4. Gumperzian
  5. gumpf
  6. gumph
  7. gumphed
  8. gumphing
  9. gumphion
  10. gumphions
  11. gumphs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gumph (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: “gumph.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gumph. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.