Dictionaries › English

gist

Pronunciation: /d͡ʒɪst/

The English word “gist” has 7 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. The main idea or substance, or the most essential part, of a longer or more complicated matter; the crux, the heart, the pith.
  2. The essential ground for action in a lawsuit, without which there is no cause of action; the gravamen.
  3. Gossip, rumour; (countable) an instance of this.
  4. A sharable snippet of source code, especially on the version controlled pastebin-hosting site GitHub Gist.
  5. A stop for lodging or rest in a journey, or the place where this happens; a rest.

verb

  1. To extract and present the main ideas or substance, or the most essential parts of (a document, piece of writing, etc.); to abridge, to summarize.
  2. To talk idly; chat; also, to gossip.

Etymology

The noun is derived from Old French gist, a noun use of the third person singular indicative of gesir (“to lie down”) (modern French gésir; compare Anglo-Norman (cest) action gist (literally “(law) (this) action lies”)), from Latin iacēre, the present active infinitive of iaceō (“to lie down, lie prostrate, recline”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(H)yeh₁- (“to throw”) (probably in the…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “gist” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.