gambrel

Uncertain, perhaps from Old Northern French gamberel, from gambe (“leg”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡæmbɹəl/

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gambrel (plural gambrels)

1. The hind leg of a horse; the hock.
2. (chiefly historical and obsolete outside dialects) A bar, usually metal, with a central loop and a hook at each end, used to hang a carcass for butchering.
   • 1997, Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 307:

     Within two hours the hog - killed, scalded, and scraped of its hair - was hanging pale from a big tree limb by a gambrel stick run through the tendons of its hind feet

3. A kind of meathook shaped roughly like a horse's hind leg.

   Synonym: gambrel hook

4. (US, architecture) A gambrel roof.

• gambrel roof
• gambrel-roofed

gambrel (third-person singular simple present gambrels, present participle gambrelling or gambreling, simple past and past participle gambrelled or gambreled)

1. To truss or hang up using a gambrel.
   • 1979, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, Random House, page 9:

     They raised him so, gambreled up by the bones in his cheek.

   • c. 1615–1616, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, “The Nice Valovr, or, The Passionate Mad-man”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, →OCLC, (please specify the act number in uppercase Roman numerals, and the scene number in lowercase Roman numerals):

     And meet me; or I'll box you while I have you, And carry you gambril'd thither like a mutton

• “gambrel”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• gambler