gage
nounEtymology From Middle English gage, from later Old French or early Middle French gager (verb), (also guagier in Old French) gage (noun), ultimately from Frankish *waddi, from Proto-Germanic *wadją (whence English wed). Doublet of wage, from the same origin through the Old Northern French variant wage. See also mortgage.
1
Something, such as a glove or other pledge, thrown down as a challenge to combat (now usually figurative).
- “But it is enough that I challenge the trial by combat — there lies my gage.” She took her embroidered glove from her hand, and flung it down before the Grand Master with an air of mingled simplicity and dignity…1819 December 20 (indicated as 1820), Walter Scott, Ivanhoe; a Romance. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co. […], →OCLC:
- "I'm nothing of the sort," exclaimed the MacQuibble, hurling down the gage of battle at once.1913, Norman Lindsay, A Curate in Bohemia, Sydney: N.S.W. Bookstall Co., published 1932:
1 more example
- The gage was down for a duel that would split the Democratic party and ensure the election of a Republican president in 1860.1988, James McPherson, Battle Cry for Freedom, Oxford, published 2003, page 166:
2
Obsolete Something valuable deposited as a guarantee or pledge; security, ransom.
- [I]t seemed to create a sort of material link between the Princess and himself, and at the end of three months it almost appeared to him, not that the exquisite book was an intended present from his own hand, but that it had been placed in that hand by the most remarkable woman in Europe.... [T]he superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic.1886, Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, London: Macmillan and Co.: