Word.ws English Dictionary

grabass

Syllables: grab·ass/ˈɡɹæbˌæs/

grabass noun: sexual groping; erotic horseplay.

Noun

grabass (uncountable)

  1. (informal, often) Sexual groping; erotic horseplay.
    • [T]hey wouldn't do any work then, just hang around and drink and play grabass with her and she didn't want that.1976, Thomas Glynn, Temporary Sanity: A Novel, →ISBN, page 66
    • Bobby was bear-hugging Sammy Vaughn and then playing grab-ass with Sammy's ex-wife Alice.1997, Lee K. Abbott, “Chapter One of Wet Places at Noon”, in New York Times, retrieved 11 Dec 2015
  2. (informal, often) Rowdy behavior; general horseplay or foolery.
    • There's no playing grab-ass or fighting in the building. You got a grudge against another man, you fight him Saturday afternoon. Any man playing grab-ass or fighting in the building spends a night in the box.1967, Cool Hand Luke, spoken by Carr (Clifton James)
    • "Anything else? Yes, Lieutenant Lemmon?"
      "Yes, sir," Lemmon drawled. "How do I get out of this chicken-shit outfit?"
      "Knock off the grabass, Glen. Okay, listen up. When you brief your people, make it clear that our mission is defensive only."1977, Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (2014 Macmillan edition), p. 46 (Google preview)

Verb

grabass (third-person singular simple present grabasses, present participle grabassing, simple past and past participle grabassed)

  1. (informal) To fool around.
    • The Paranoids were singing, to the tune of ‘Adeste Fideles’: […] grabassing around, trying to push each other over the side.1966 March, Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

Forms of grabass

Noun
alternative formgrab ass
alternative formgrab-ass
Verb
third-person singular presentgrabasses
present participlegrabassing
past participlegrabassed
pastgrabassed

Origin of grabass

From grab + ass.

Questions about grabass

What does grabass mean?
Grabass means sexual groping; erotic horseplay.
What part of speech is grabass?
Grabass can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce grabass?
Grabass is pronounced /ˈɡɹæbˌæs/.

Words near grabass in the dictionary

  1. grab-ass
  2. grab-bag
  3. grab-bags
  4. grabable
  5. Grabar
  6. grabass
  7. grabassed
  8. grabasses
  9. grabassing
  10. Grabau
  11. Grabaus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: grabass (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-grabass.wav.

Cite this entry: “grabass.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/grabass. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.