Dictionary

gambade en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from French gambade.

Meanings

1. (Scotland, obsolete) The leap of a horse.
2. (Scotland, obsolete) A prank or frolic.
   • How strange and yet how good it was to thread those narrow passages once more! Their suffocating constriction and padded, ladderlike steps summoned up a thousand memories of gambades and trysts: coursing the white wolves, scourging the prisoners of the antechamber, reencountering Oringa. 1987, Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun, 1st US edition, New York: Tor Books, →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 243–244:
   • He made his hawke to fly, […] And in the holy place She mutyd there a chase Upon my corporas face. Such sacrificium laudis He made with suche gambawdis. c. 1503–1512, John Skelton, Ware the Hauke; republished in John Scattergood, editor, John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, 1983, →OCLC, page 63, lines 47, 61–65:

Forms

Synonyms

gambado