gruesome
adjUK /ˈɡɹuːsəm/ · US /ˈɡɹusəm/
Etymology From grue (“(archaic except Northern England, Scotland) to be frightened; to shudder with fear”) + -some (suffix meaning ‘characterized by some specific condition or quality, usually to a considerable degree’ forming adjectives and nouns), probably popularized by the Scottish novelist and poet Walter Scott (1771–1832): see, for example, the 1816 quotation. cognates * Danish grusom (“cruel; horrible”) * Middle Dutch grousaem, grusaem (modern Dutch gruwzaam (“cruel; gruesome”)) * Middle High German grûsam, grûwesam (modern German grausam (“cruel”)) * Norwegian Bokmål grusom (“cruel; horrible”)
1
Repellently frightful and shocking; ghastly, horrific.
- He taks a ſvvirlie, auld moſs-oak, / For ſome black, grouſome Carlin; […]1785 (date written), Robert Burns, “Halloween”, in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. […], 2nd edition, volume I, Edinburgh: […] T[homas] Cadell, […], and William Creech, […], published 1793, →OCLC, stanza XXIII, page 189:
- There's a wheen German horse doun at Glasgow yonder; they ca' their commander Wittybody, or some sic name, though he's as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e'er I saw.1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter XII, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume I (The Black Dwarf), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]; London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 259:
4 more examples
- With many a grausome shape unutterable, / Limn'd were the cavernous sepulchral walls; […]1848, [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], “Book V”, in King Arthur. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, stanza XLIX, page 219:
- He has taken a bride / To his gruesome side, / That's as fair as himself is bold: […]1855, Robert Browning, “A Lovers’ Quarrel”, in Men and Women […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, stanza 5, page 9:
- [T]hey packed him [a dead duck] and sealed him up in brown paper, and put him in the cupboard of an unoccupied study, where he was found in the holidays by the matron, a grewsome body.1857, [Thomas Hughes], “The Bird-Fanciers”, in Tom Brown’s School Days. […], Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, part II, page 303:
- [T]he dim, mysterious half-light of the cellar falling in a grewsome way upon the misshapen bulk of a Chinese deity in the background, […]1874 September, Bret Harte, “Wan Lee, the Pagan”, in Tales of the Argonauts, and Other Sketches, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company (late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.), published 1876, →OCLC, page 85:
2
Broadly, Informal Awful, terrible.
- The team was so unprepared that the way it played was just gruesome.
- Then says I to myself,—"John Ridd, these trees, and pools, and lonesome rocks, and setting of the sunlight, are making a gruesome coward of thee. Shall I go back to my mother so, and be called her fearless boy?"1869, R[ichard] D[oddridge] Blackmore, chapter VII, in Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. […], volume I, London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, […], →OCLC, page 82:
- Some of his [Nathaniel Hawthorne's] companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes.1879, Henry James, Junr., “Brook Farm and Concord”, in John Morley, editor, Hawthorne (English Men of Letters; 13), London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 87:
- Derived terms
- gruesomely, gruesomeness, gruesome twosome, ungruesome