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Don’t let the similarities of sound and general flavor between gambit and gamble trip you up; the two words are unrelated. Gambit first appeared in English in a 1656 chess handbook that was said to feature almost a hundred illustrated gambetts. Gambett traces back first to the Spanish word gambito, and before that to the Italian gambetto, from gamba meaning “leg.” Gambetto referred to the act of tripping someone, as in wrestling, in order to gain an advantage. In chess, gambit (or gambett, as it was once spelled) originally referred to a chess opening whereby the bishop’s pawn is intentionally sacrificed—or tripped—to gain an advantage in position. Gambit is now applied to many other chess openings, but after being pinned down for years, it also finally broke free of chess’s hold and is used generally to refer to any “move,” whether literal or rhetorical, done to get a leg up, so to speak. While such moves can be risky, gambit is not synonymous with gamble, which likely comes from Old English gamen, meaning “amusement, jest, pastime”—source too of game.
Examples of gambit in a Sentence
Nick Paton Walsh, CNN Money, 21 Nov. 2025
There's nothing to hide, and the Oversight Committee is releasing far more information than the discharge petition, their little gambit, ever even anticipated.
—Khaleda Rahman, MSNBC Newsweek, 17 Nov. 2025
That new level of credibility is far more dangerous than the old-fashioned propagandist’s text-only gambit of deliberately misquoting or even inventing entire sentences for the mouths of one’s enemies.
—New Atlas, 15 Nov. 2025
This gambit could not have backfired more definitively.
—Rachel Morris, New Yorker, 14 Nov. 2025
See All Example Sentences for gambit
Cite this Entry
“Gambit.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gambit. Accessed 22 Nov. 2025.
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