The Etymology of Gambrel
Gambrel travelled from Greek anatomy through French butchery to American architecture. The Greek kampē meant a joint or bend; Late Latin gamba narrowed it to mean specifically the hock (the joint above a horse's back foot). Old North French gambe simply meant leg, and the diminutive gamberel named the hooked stick butchers used to hang slaughtered animals by their hocks — the stick was shaped, in fact, like a hock. English adopted gambrel in the 1540s for the horse's hock itself, then for the butcher's stick, and these were the only senses for two centuries. Then in 1739 the word leapt into American architectural vocabulary: the distinctive two-slope roof common in colonial Dutch and English farmhouses, with its broken angle resembling a horse's hock, was christened a gambrel roof. The architectural sense is now overwhelmingly the dominant one in American English; British English barely uses the word at all.