You hear a lot these days about the “gig economy.” It’s the idea that fewer people can find traditional jobs where you have a particular employer who pays you a fairly predictable amount, so they find more temporary ways to earn money. These often involve acting as independent contractors instead of employees. In a “gig economy”, someone might drive for Uber or Lyft a couple of days per week, scour big-box stores for sale items to resell on eBay or Amazon some of the time, organize a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for their performance art presentation, and so on. Each one of those activities would be a “gig.”
The word “gig” seems to come from the world of working musicians; they’ve been calling performances “gigs” since about the 1920s. Here’s a 1926 example from “Melody Maker:” “One popular ‘gig’ band makes use of a nicely printed booklet.” “Melody Maker” was a London publication, so “gig” seems to have been in use in both US and British English at the time.
Nobody knows where the musical engagement sense of “gig” came from, but that’s balanced out by the details we have about the dozen-or-so other meanings of “gig”, some of which date back to the 1200s. The oldest, and thus presumably original meaning of “gig” is a person (especially, though not always, a female) who acts in a flighty way. Citations from the 1200s are pretty close to incomprehensible today, so instead here’s one from a dictionary in the 1600s: “A young Gig, a wanton Lass.”
Possibly related to something you might do when acting “flighty,” by the 1400s “gig” also meant an object that spins or rotates. It could be anything from the toy top Shakespeare referred to in Love’s Labor Lost (“Thou disputes like an Infant: goe whip thy Gigg”) to a spinning device that’s part of a machine (“Gigs, or gig machines, are rotatory cylinders covered with wire-teeth, for teazling woollen cloth”). A similar sort of spinning machine was a kind of “pinwheel” made of feathers; this was supposed to attract birds into a net. It doesn’t sound all that plausible, but in 1698 it was described this way: “A great help..for bringing in of larks about your net, is a gigg of feathers..which twirleth swiftly round on the least breath of wind.”
In the 1700s a “gig” could be anybody odd or unusual: “Upon my word, Hugh, you are the greatest gig in the world.” Oddly enough, during the same era, a “gig” was also a lightweight horse carriage. You don’t suppose Hugh was being called a wagon…? But anyway, carriages have wheels that spin — like gigs — and spinning wheels often squeak. And sure enough, “gig” has at times meant a squeaking sound. Chaucer used it that way.
You might hear a squeaking sound on a wooden boat too, as the boards shift in the water, and when you’re in a small boat you might find out that it, too, is called a “gig.” Now, one reason for being in a small boat is fishing. And if you’re using a kind of spear to (try to) catch fish, well, that’s another sort of “gig” — once again, this usage stems from the 1700s, a time primarily known (at least it should be) as the golden age of the word: “They have wooden fish gigs with 2, 3 or 4 prongs each very ingeniously made with which they strike fish.”
In 1688, Randle Holme wrote “The Academy of Armory,” and explained that “A Gigge is a hole in the Ground where Fire is made to dry the Flax.” And speaking of flax, which you’d eventually use (once it was dry) to make some cloth, one step in that process is to use a sort of comb on the cloth to “raise the nap.” I have no clue what “raising the nap” means, but the comb you’d use to do it? That’s right, it’s a gig. And that brings us, finally to the various forms of “gig” that are verbs — using the gig that’s a sort of comb was called “gigging.” To save some time, in fact, every time there’s a thing called a gig, using that thing to do whatever it does, whether it’s spearing fish, acting like an idiot, going for a carriage ride, or playing your guitar in a bar, that’s called “gigging.” And sure enough, if you’re a combination Uber driver, Amazon reseller, part-time musician, and the person in a crazy costume dancing outside a store to attract customers, what you’re doing is still called “gigging.”
