Word.ws English Dictionary

at grips

at grips prepositional phrase: fighting; engaged in a confrontation.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Fighting; engaged in a confrontation.
    • No doubt of it, Edmund was at grips with that bumptious little hairy dog. They were going it at the very top note of sadistic fury, screaming and snip-snapping in such a lightning mixture of black and white murder that the eye could not follow it.1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 140

Questions about at grips

What does at grips mean?
At grips means fighting; engaged in a confrontation.
What part of speech is at grips?
At grips is a prepositional phrase.

Words near at grips in the dictionary

  1. at full throttle
  2. at full tilt
  3. at gaze
  4. at grade
  5. at grass
  6. at grips
  7. at gunpoint
  8. at half-sword
  9. at hand
  10. at haphazard
  11. at heart

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: at grips (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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