An archaic or dialectal past tense form of 'gel,' meaning to congeal, freeze, or take on a gel-like consistency; also used in dialect as an exclamation.
From gel (verb), which comes from gelatin; gell is an older or non-standard spelling variant found in archaic or regional English dialects.
Old spellings like 'gell' remind us that modern English spelling conventions are relatively recent—before dictionaries standardized everything, the same word could be spelled multiple ways!
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