GIMMICK

[Dr. Goodword]

• gimmick •

Pronunciation: gi-mik • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: A piece of trickery.

Notes: Today's Good Word originated as a gimmick itself (see Word History) but has survived long enough to have created a family. The adjective is gimmicky "containing a gimmick, like a gimmick" with an implied adverb, gimmickily. (Note the Y becomes I.) The art of creating gimmicks or the class of all gimmicks is gimmickery. Anything lacking gimmicks is gimmickless.

In Play: A gimmick is anything designed to trick someone into doing something they would not otherwise do: "Professor Lambrani's cane is not so much a support as a gimmick for gaining him the sympathy of his students and colleagues." Advertising and marketing have replaced magicians as the No. 1 users of gimmickery: "Rebates are gimmicks that allow advertisers to offer reduced prices only to customers willing to do bothersome work for them."

Word History: Today's Good Word started out in life as a thing of magic. It seems to have originated around the early 1920s but, like most new words in those days, was not spelled for years. The original spelling was apparently intended to be gimac, an anagram of the word magic. The word itself was first used by those who had the greatest need of gimmicks at the time, magicians. It soon came to mean "a device for making a fair game crooked" (Wise-Crack Dictionary, 1926), then on to what it means today. (Tim Ward uses no gimmicks in coming up with interesting words like this one, which he first suggested we explore.)

[Audiendus]

The art of creating gimmicks or the class of all gimmicks is gimmickery.

I would write "gimmickry", which seems to be the usual spelling. "Gimmickery" is an occasional variant.

[LukeJavan8]

I think I've seen gimmickry more often.

[bnjtokyo]

"Gimmick" was posted as the Word of the Day a couple days back but never made it to the Agora. Then I discovered it has appeared twice in the past (2006 and 2010) and I got interested in the relative frequency of the two spellings of noun that refers to the "art of creating gimmicks or the class of all gimmicks" mentioned in prior comments. According to the ngram viewer (see link) "gimmickry" is far more common than "gimmickery"
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... ry%3B%2Cc0

And a note on early usage: The people who handled the logistics of getting the first atomic weapon code-named "Little Boy" over the target, Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, referred to the device as "the gimmick." I wonder how the people involved in transporting the bomb across the Pacific to Tinian and preparing it came up with the nickname.