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Gaol means jail: the prison building, or being locked up there. This is the old British spelling. You still meet it on old signs, in older British books, and sometimes in Australian or legal writing, but almost everyone now jail, even in Britain. Though actually, it is not another word at all — say it exactly like jail. Americans never really used gaol; they wrote jail. If a British person gaol today, they are being traditional, not talking about a different place. The odd letters came through French from a Latin word for a cage.
（英式舊拼法）監獄、牢房；跟 jail 是同一個字，只是拼法不同
組成From Middle English gayole, gaiol, and other spellings, via Old French gaiole, gayolle, gaole, from Medieval Latin gabiola, from Late Latin caveola, a small form of Latin cavea (“cavity, coop, cage”).
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
gaolnoun/d͡ʒeɪl/
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Dated spelling of jail.
- There's every Staffordshire crime-piece ever made in this cabinet, and that's unique. The Van Hoyer Museum in New York hasn't that very rare second version of Maria Marten's Red Barn over there, nor the little Frederick George Manning – he was the criminal Dickens saw hanged on the roof of the gaol in Horsemonger Lane, by the way —
- There was a simple reason for Sirius' complete absence from Harry's life until then – Sirius had been in Azkaban, the terrifying wizard gaol guarded by creatures called Dementors, […]
gaolverb/d͡ʒeɪl/
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Dated spelling of jail.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。