Words similar to gunsel

Example sentences for: gunsel

How can you use “gunsel” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:

Hammett had a taste for trying to slip censorable words past cautious editors, and he succeeded with gunsel , which sounds innocent enough to anyone who never heard it before.
There is support, in both the OED 2nd Supplement and the Dictionary of American Slang , by Wentworth and Flexner, for Tony Thorne's definition, in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang [XVII, 3], of `callow youth' for gunsel . That appears to be the primary meaning of the word, whose suggested definition is from Yiddish genzel, gantzel and/ or German Gänslein, Gänzel `gosling, young goose.
Happy Trails raises as many questions as it answers: I have trouble believing that gunsel is a “cowboy word for a braggart,” for which no evidence is adduced.
When the book was coming out in Black Mask , in 1929, the editor presumably took gunsel to be a synonym of gunman , and in that sense it was very widely adopted by Hammett's imitators, by the general public, and even, it seems, by the underworld.
That vowel would not yield the first vowel of gunsel, hence a Yiddish origin for it is doubtful.