grime
/ɡɹaɪm/ noun, verb, proper noun
Forms grimes griming grimed Grim Grims Gryme Grymes Gryms
- noun Dirt, grease, soot, etc. that is ingrained and difficult to remove. “Underneath all that soot, dirt and grime is the true beauty of the church in soft shades of sandstone.”
- noun (music) A genre of urban music that emerged in London, England, in the early 2000s, primarily a development of UK garage, dancehall, and hip hop.
- verb (transitive) To begrime; to cake with dirt.
- proper noun A surname from Old Norse.
Synonyms
dirt filth soil stain grease grunge dirty begrime colly bemire
Etymology
From Middle English grim (“dirt or soot covering the face”), from a specialized use of Old English grīma (“mask”), from Proto-West Germanic *grīmō, from Proto-Germanic *grīmô (“mask”).
Likely influenced by dialectal Dutch grijmsel (“grit, grime”), Dutch grijm (“soot, grime”), Middle Dutch gryme (“mask”), Middle Low German greme (“dirt”), compare Danish grime (“a halter”), Danish grimet (“soiled, stripy”), Norwegian Bokmål grimete (“soiled, stripy”), Norwegian Nynorsk grimete (“soiled, stripy”).
From the Old Norse personal name Grímr.
Webster’s 1913
- noun Foul matter; dirt, rubbed in; sullying blackness, deeply ingrained.
- verb To sully or soil deeply; to dirt. Shak.
Etymology [Cf. Dan. grim, griim, lampblack, soot, grime, Icel. gr mask, sort of hood, OD. grijmsel, grimsel, soot, smut, and E. grimace.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “grime”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details