gruesome
Part of speech: adj
Morphological type: derivation
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”)
Base: grue
Affixes: -some
Inflected forms:
form: gruesomer
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: more gruesome
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: gruesomest
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: most gruesome
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: grewsome
pos: adj
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: Repellently frightful and shocking; ghastly, horrific.
pos: adj
examples: He taks a ſvvirlie, auld moſs-oak, / For ſome black, grouſome Carlin; […]
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.
With many a grausome shape unutterable, / Limn'd were the cavernous sepulchral walls; […]
He has taken a bride / To his gruesome side, / That's as fair as himself is bold: […]
[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.
[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, […]
"Fallen in love! Who is there to fall in love with a man like me? Look at my shadow, Leonard." It was a gruesome-looking shadow, with high back, and head thrust forward.
True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country—the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine—but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.
There are people that ship off far gruesomer figures / in sermons, in art, and in literature— […]
If ugliness be an attribute of nature, then the buzzard is its expression incarnate. […] Creeping up a little distance from the scene, I quietly hid in a great drift of leaves and corn-blades that the winds had piled in the corner of the old worm fence, and became an interested spectator at the strangest, gruesomest assemblage ever seen,—a buzzards' banquet.
In the middle of the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and mouldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar grewsome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle nearby was a third, a wee mite of a skeleton.
[White House press secretary] Jay Carney said that the US was considering whether to release photos of [Osama] bin Laden after he was killed on Sunday but that the photos were "gruesome" and could be inflammatory.
gloss: Awful, terrible.
pos: adj
tags: broadly
informal
examples: The team was so unprepared that the way it played was just gruesome.
gloss: Of a person: filled with fear; afraid, fearful.
pos: adj
tags: archaic
rare
examples: 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?"
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.
Derived words: gruesomely
gruesomeness
gruesome twosome
ungruesome
Translations: