gift of gab

Fluency of speech; also, a tendency to boast. Gab, both the noun meaning “speech” and the verb meaning “to chatter,” is believed to have come from the Gaelic dialect word gob, for “mouth.” Indeed it so appeared in Samuel Colvil’s Whiggs Supplication (1695): “There was a man called Job . . . He had a good gift of the Gob.” During the next century it became gab, as in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794): “He knew well enough that he had the gift of the gab.” Later “the” was dropped.