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Gluttony
Gluttony (Latin gula, from gluttire, to gulp down) is the inordinate indulgence in food and drink, one of the seven deadly sins, opposed by temperance; Aquinas listed five modes (too soon, expensively, much, eagerly, daintily), and modern clinical analogues include binge eating disorder.
Glynn Wolfe
Glynn "Scotty" Wolfe (1908-1997), American Baptist minister from Blythe, California, held the Guinness record for most monogamous marriages by a man, 29 or 31; his last wife Linda Essex-Wolfe held the women's record with 23.
Gnawa
Gnawa (Gnaoua) is a Moroccan Sufi brotherhood and its trance music and healing rituals, rooted in sub-Saharan African descent communities; inscribed by UNESCO in 2019, centered on the lila ceremony, guembri and qraqeb.
Go back to where you came from
"Go back to where you came from" is a nativist racist epithet used in the US, Australia, and elsewhere to exclude immigrants and citizens of color; documented from the American Colonization Society era through the 2019 Trump "go back" tweets, Title VII workplace law, and the Australian TV series of that name.
Go Topless Day
Go Topless Day is an annual demonstration day, held since 2007 on the Saturday nearest August 26 (Women's Equality Day), organized by GoTopless to assert women's equal right to go topless in public; distinct from the trademarked May Jeep event of the same name.
Go/no-go task
The go/no-go task is a response inhibition paradigm in cognitive psychology in which participants respond to frequent go stimuli and withhold responses to rare no-go stimuli, with errors indexing inhibitory control.
Goal
A goal is a desired end state a person or group commits to reaching, studied through goal-setting theory, which holds that specific, difficult goals improve performance.
Goal setting
Goal setting: specifying an aim in advance; Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory holds that specific, difficult goals with commitment and feedback improve performance, moderated by ability, task complexity, and task knowledge, with mixed applied evidence.
Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire
The Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire, also called the Godin-Shephard questionnaire, is a four-item self-report measure of weekly leisure-time physical activity, developed by Godin and Shephard in 1985.
Godparent
Godparent: a baptismal sponsor creating spiritual kinship with a child and the child's parents; also called fictive kinship or, in Latin America, compadrazgo. First mentioned by Tertullian; parents were barred from sponsoring their own children by the eighth century.
Godwin's law
Godwin's law, Godwin's rule of Nazi analogies, is a 1990 internet adage by attorney Mike Godwin: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a Nazi or Hitler comparison approaches one; designed as a counter-meme, formalized in the OED in 2012.
Going postal
Going postal: American slang for extreme, often violent workplace rage, from a series of USPS shootings beginning with Patrick Sherrill's 1986 Edmond, Oklahoma massacre that killed 14.
Gold digger
Gold digger: derogatory term for a person entering a relationship for money, applied mostly to women. First recorded 1915; popularized by Hopwood's 1919 play The Gold Diggers and Depression-era films.
Golden Rule
The Golden Rule, or Ethic of Reciprocity, is the principle of treating others as one wants to be treated, found across major religions. Distinguished from the Silver and Platinum Rules and critiqued for projecting one's own preferences onto others.
Goler clan
Goler clan: poor rural families on South Mountain, Nova Scotia, near Wolfville, descended from War of 1812 Black refugees named Gold. In 1984 a teenage girl's disclosure exposed generations of incest and child abuse; sixteen adults were jailed, and the case produced R. v. Johnstone, Johnstone and Goler (1986) and the book On South Mountain.
Gomani
Gomani is the royal name of the Inkosi ya Makhosi, the paramount king of the Maseko Ngoni of Malawi and Mozambique, descended from the ancestral name Ngcamane.
Gondi people
Gondi people (Gonds), one of the largest tribal groups of central and south India, mostly Scheduled Tribe under Article 342; speak Dravidian Gondi; historic Gondwana kingdoms; agrarian, forest-dependent livelihoods.
Gook
Gook is an English ethnic slur for East and Southeast Asian people, first recorded as U.S. military slang for Filipinos in 1899 and extended through successive wars to Koreans, Vietnamese, and Asians generally.
Gooning
Gooning, also called the goon state or goon space, is internet slang for prolonged edging to pornography seeking a trance-like state. Originating on Urban Dictionary in 2005, it grew via Reddit subcultures from 2019 and went mainstream around 2023; it is not a clinical diagnosis.
Gopnik (гопник)
Gopnik (гопник), derogatory Russian and post-Soviet slang for a tracksuit-wearing street youth of the urban periphery, parallel to the chav; known for the Slavic squat, counterfeit Adidas from the 1980 Moscow Olympics era, and 2010s memes.
Gorani people
Gorani: South Slavic Muslim community of the Gora region in southern Kosovo's Dragash municipality (30–40% there), speaking the Torlakian-Macedonian transitional našinski ethnolect; 10,265 in Kosovo's 2011 census; identity contested among Bosniak, Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian claims.
Gordon Allport
Gordon Willard Allport (1897–1967) was a Harvard psychologist, pioneer of trait theory (cardinal, central, secondary traits, functional autonomy), and author of The Nature of Prejudice (1954), origin of the four-condition intergroup contact hypothesis.
Gossip
Gossip is evaluative talk about absent third parties; researchers define positive, negative, and neutral forms. Key facts: 52 minutes daily on average, three-quarters neutral, over 90% of employees gossip at work, and gossip sustains cooperation via reputations.
Gotra (गोत्र)
Gotra (गोत्र) is the Hindu patrilineal exogamous clan, traced to a common male ancestor, regulating marriage via gotra and pravara rules alongside the sapinda bar; same-gotra marriage is legal under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955.
Gould family
Gould family: American dynasty of Gilded Age financier Jay Gould (1836–1892), his wife Helen Day Miller, and their six children including George Jay Gould, Helen Gould Shepard, and Anna Gould, duchess de Talleyrand-Périgord.
Goy (גוי)
Goy (גוי; plural goyim) is Hebrew for "nation," later meaning a non-Jew or gentile. Neutral in the Bible (even applied to Israel), it narrowed in rabbinic literature; Yiddish derivatives include goyish and Shabbos goy.
Grace Ingalls
Grace Pearl Ingalls Dow (1877–1941), youngest Ingalls sister of Laura Ingalls Wilder, born in Burr Oak, Iowa; teacher, journalist, wife of Nathan Dow; "Baby Grace" of the Little House books.
Grace Tame
Grace Tame (born 1994) is a Tasmanian survivor-advocate who overturned Tasmania's sexual assault gag laws via #LetHerSpeak, was 2021 Australian of the Year, and founded the Grace Tame Foundation, which closed in 2026.
Graded response model
The graded response model, or GRM, is an item response theory model for ordered response categories such as Likert scales, introduced by Fumiko Samejima in 1968.
Grand Wizard
Grand Wizard: title of the national leader of the first Ku Klux Klan, first held by Nathan Bedford Forrest from 1867; subordinate titles included Grand Dragon and Grand Cyclops; later Klans used Imperial Wizard.