Word.ws English Dictionary

bear's grease

bear's grease noun: the fat of the brown bear mixed with beef marrow and perfume, formerly a folk treatment for hair loss.

Noun

bear's grease (uncountable)

  1. The fat of the brown bear mixed with beef marrow and perfume, formerly a folk treatment for hair loss.
    • “Stuff!” growled the other, “you fancied you were getting bald the other day, and bragged about it as you do about everything. But you began to use the bear’s-grease pot directly the hairdresser told you; and are scented like a barber ever since.”1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 47, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published...
    • Oh, for a jar of bearʼs grease such as was always in supply at Mrs Castawayʼs — but she canʼt imagine where she could buy bearʼs grease in Marylebone.2002, Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, Canongate Books (2010), page 336

Forms of bear's grease

alternative formbear grease

Questions about bear's grease

What does bear's grease mean?
Bear's grease means the fat of the brown bear mixed with beef marrow and perfume, formerly a folk treatment for hair loss.
What part of speech is bear's grease?
Bear's grease is a noun.

Words near bear's grease in the dictionary

  1. bear witness
  2. bear's breech
  3. bear's breeches
  4. bear's ear
  5. bear's garlic
  6. bear's grease
  7. bear's-breech
  8. bear's-breeches
  9. bear's-foot
  10. bear's-grape
  11. bear's-paw

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bear's grease (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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