1795 B. Dearborn Columbian Gram. 135 Improprieties, commonly called Vulgarisms, [include]..Gal for girl.

1795 J. Murdock Triumphs of Love iii. 51 Sambo, what a gal call a pretty fellow.

1804 T. G. Fessenden Orig. Poems 94 At length came in the Deacon's Sal From milking at the barn, And faith she is as good a gal As ever twisted yarn.

1824 J. Wight Mornings at Bow St. 132 Gal—cockney for girl.

1836 C. Dickens Pickwick Papers (1837) iv. 39 My daughters, gentlemen—my gals these are.

1851 H. Mayhew London Labour I. 477/2 The ‘gals’ are sure to be beaten cruelly..by their ‘chaps’.

1874 E. Eggleston Circuit Rider xxiii. 216 I heerd say as he was a goin' to splice with a gal that could pray like a angel afire.

1927 E. C. L. Adams Congaree Sketches ix. 15 Dey torment de little gal so till one day she swallow a handful of bottle glass.

1951 Newsweek 8 Oct. 28/3 Discussing cool and the degrees of coolness, one boy reported: ‘If you like a guy or gal, they're cool.’

1986 O. P. Adisa in S. Brown Caribbean New Wave (1990) 5 Lilly, gal, wha get inna yuh?

2000 N. Hopkinson Midnight Robber 290 A little gal pickney.

2005 Metro (Toronto) 2 Mar. 23/2 Faux pearls,..perfect whether you're a straight ahead girly-girl or a sassy gal who wears her pearls with a wink.

1914 O. Klotz in Nature 13 Aug. 611/2 So long ago as 1909 Wiechert used the term ‘gal’ in the report for the Göttingen earthquake station for that unit, being the first syllable of Galileo... Others, as well as myself, have used ‘gal’ or rather ‘milligal’ in analyses of earthquakes... Dyne is the unit of force, gal the unit of acceleration.

1935 Nature 23 Mar. 471/1 A particular case as example in which an error of 0.01 gal in ‘g’ would lead to an error of 40 ft. in geoidal elevation.

1937 Geogr. Jrnl. 89 92 Unfortunately the old Helmert (1901) is used instead of the international formula adopted at Stockholm in 1930, in which the equatorial value of ‘g’ is greater by 0.019 gals (=cm. per sec. per sec.).

1955 Sci. Amer. Sept. 165/3 Painstaking pendulum measurements have established the value of gravity as 981.274 gal.

1971 Geophysical Jrnl. 22 449 With the general adoption of the International System of Units..the c.g.s. unit of acceleration, the gal (or Gal), is doomed to obsolescence.