grim.
Dismal and gloomy, cold and forbidding.
Meaning & usage
Dismal and gloomy, cold and forbidding.
Life was grim in many northern industrial towns.
Rigid and unrelenting.
His grim determination enabled him to win.
Ghastly or sinister.
A grim castle overshadowed the village.
Disgusting; gross.
– Wanna see the dead rat I found in my fridge? – Mate, that is grim!
Fierce, cruel, furious.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English grim, from Old English grimm, from Proto-West Germanic *grimm, from Proto-Germanic *grimmaz, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrem- (“to resound, thunder, grumble, roar”).
To make grim; to give a stern or forbidding aspect to.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English grim, from Old English grimm, from Proto-West Germanic *grimm, from Proto-Germanic *grimmaz, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrem- (“to resound, thunder, grumble, roar”).
A promiscuous woman.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English grim, from Old English grimm, from Proto-West Germanic *grimm, from Proto-Germanic *grimmaz, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrem- (“to resound, thunder, grumble, roar”).
Anger, wrath.
A specter, ghost, haunting spirit.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English grim, grym, greme, from Old English *grimu, *grimmu, grima, from Proto-Germanic *grimmį̄ (“anger, wrath”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrem- (“to resound, thunder, grumble, roar”). Cognate with Middle Dutch grimme, Middle High German grimme f (“anger”), modern German Grimm m.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.