grit
/ɡɹɪt/ noun, verb, adjective
Forms grits gritting gritted
- noun A collection of hard small materials, such as dirt, ground stone, debris from sandblasting or other such grinding, or swarf from metalworking. “The flower beds were white with grit from sand blasting the flagstone walkways.”
- noun Sand or a sand–salt mixture spread on wet and, especially, icy roads and footpaths to improve traction.
- noun Small, hard, inedible particles in food. “These cookies seem to have grit from nutshells in them.”
- noun A measure of the size of abrasive grains, such as those on sandpaper, and thus their relative coarseness or fineness; the smaller the number, the coarser the abrasive: thus, 60 is rough, 600 is fine, and 3000 is ultrafine. “I need a sheet of 100 grit sandpaper.”
- noun (geology) A hard, coarse-grained siliceous sandstone; gritstone. Also, a finer sharp-grained sandstone, e.g., grindstone grit.
- noun (idiomatic) Strength of mind; courage or fearlessness; fortitude. “That kid with the cast on his arm has the grit to play dodgeball.”
- verb (transitive, ergative) To clench (one's teeth), particularly in reaction to pain or anger. “We had no choice but to grit our teeth and get on with it.”
- verb To cover with grit.
- verb (obsolete, intransitive) To give forth a grating sound, like sand under the feet; to grate; to grind.
- noun (usually in the plural) Husked but unground oats.
- noun (usually in the plural) Coarsely ground corn or hominy used as porridge. “grits and eggs”
- noun (Canadian politics) A member or supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada or one of its provincial wings (except for the Quebec provincial wing).
- adjective (Canadian politics) Of or belonging to the Liberal Party of Canada.
Synonyms
Etymology
With early modern vowel shortening, from Middle English grete, griet, from Old English grēot, from Proto-West Germanic *greut, from Proto-Germanic *greutą. Compare grist.
From Middle English *gryt (“bran, chaff”), from Old English grytt, from Proto-West Germanic *gruti (“coarsely ground bits”), ablaut variant of Proto-Indo-European *gʰrewd-. See above. Doublet of goetta.
After the Clear Grits, 19th-century reformers so named because they wanted members who were "all sand and no dirt, clear grit all the way through".
Webster’s 1913
- noun Sand or gravel; rough, hard particles.
- noun The coarse part of meal.
- verb To give forth a grating sound, as sand under the feet; to grate; to grind.
- verb To grind; to rub harshly together; to grate; as, to grit the teeth. [Collog.]
Etymology [OE, greet, greot, sand, gravel, AS. greót grit, sant, dust; akin to OS griott, OFries. gret gravel, OHG. grioz, G. griess, Icel. grjot, and to E. groats, grout. See Groats, Grout, and cf. Grail gravel.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “grit”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details