Word.ws English Dictionary

gramarye

Syllables: gra·ma·rye/ˈɡɹæməɹi/

gramarye noun: grammar; learning.

Noun

gramarye (uncountable)

  1. (obsolete) Grammar; learning.
    • […] I dearly love to climb / Time's ladder, and identify / Myself with worthies long gone by – / And Lucerne seems (at least to me) / Fit circle for such gramarye; […]1835 April, “Tour of Oliver Yorke’s Rhyming Cousin”, in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, volume XI, number LXIV, London: James Fraser, 215 Regent Street, →OCLC, page 405
  2. (archaic) Mystical learning; the occult, magic, sorcery.
    • My mother was a weſterne woman / And learned in gramaryè, / And when I learned at the ſchole, / Something ſhee taught itt me.1765, Thomas Percy, compiler, “King Estmere”, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: […], volume I, London: […] J[ames] Dodsley […], →OCLC, book I, page 64, lines 143–146
    • And, but that stronger spells were spread, / And the door might not be opened, / He had laid him on her very bed. / Whate'er he did of gramarye [footnote: Magic.], / Was always done maliciously. / He flung the warrior on the ground, / And the blood welled freshly from the wound.1805, Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem, 2nd edition, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster-Row, and A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh, by James Ballantyne...

Proper noun capitalized: Gramarye

Gramarye

  1. (literary, rare) The island of Britain.
    • You must remember that this was in the old Merry England of Gramarye, when the rosy barons ate with their fingers, and had peacocks served before them with all their tail feathers streaming, or boars' heads with the tusks stuck in again— […]1958, T[erence] H[anbury] White, chapter XV, in The Once and Future King, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, →ISBN, part I (The Sword in the Stone), page 137
    • When they had reached the top, he sat down puffing, and the old man sat beside him to admire the view. It was England that came out slowly, as the late moon rose: his royal realm of Gramarye. Stretched at his feet, she spread herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the imagined...1977, T[erence] H[anbury] White, chapter 18, in The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King, Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, published 2011, →ISBN, pages 108–109

gramarye meaning in Tamil

gramarye in Tamil

மாயவித்தை கற்றல்

Forms of gramarye

alternative formgramary
alternative formgrammary

Origin of gramarye

Inherited from Middle English gramarie, from Old French gramarie, a variant of gramaire; thus a doublet of glamour, glamoury, grammar, and grimoire. The word was revived by Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832).

Adopted by English author Terence Hanbury White (1906–1964) in his book The Once and Future King (1958; based on shorter works published between 1938 and 1941) as a name for Britain, based on the reference to “Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye” in the poem Puck’s Song from Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) by English author and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) – the stanza italicized below, which is the last in the poem, appears in White’s book just before the start of the first chapter. Trackway and Camp and City lost, Salt Marsh where now is corn; Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease, And so was England born! She is not any common Earth, Water or wood or air, But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye, Where you and I will fare. Kipling is likely to have been referring to an isle of magic (see gramarye) rather than using Gramarye as a newly coined name for Britain.

Questions about gramarye

What does gramarye mean?
Gramarye means grammar; learning.
What is gramarye in Tamil?
Gramarye in Tamil is மாயவித்தை கற்றல். See Gramarye meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is gramarye?
Gramarye can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce gramarye?
Gramarye is pronounced /ˈɡɹæməɹi/ (UK).

Words near gramarye in the dictionary

  1. gramagrasses
  2. Gramajo
  3. Gramajos
  4. Graman
  5. gramary
  6. gramarye
  7. gramas
  8. gramash
  9. gramashes
  10. gramatically
  11. Grambau

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gramarye (page history and authors); Gramarye (page history and authors); gramarye (Tamil Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-gramarye.wav.

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