Word.ws English Dictionary

Grimm's law

Grimm's law proper noun: a sound change that affected the Proto-Indo-European stop consonants in the development of Proto-Germanic, causing devoicing or change into a fricative.

Proper noun

Grimm's law

  1. (Indo-European-studies) A sound change that affected the Proto-Indo-European stop consonants in the development of Proto-Germanic, causing devoicing or change into a fricative.
  2. (Indo-European-studies) The description of this sound change (as originally formulated by Jacob Grimm), which establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives, and the consonants of Proto-Indo-European and most other Indo-European languages.

Origin of Grimm's law

Named for Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), German author, linguist and folklorist.

Questions about Grimm's law

What does Grimm's law mean?
Grimm's law means a sound change that affected the Proto-Indo-European stop consonants in the development of Proto-Germanic, causing devoicing or change into a fricative.
What part of speech is Grimm's law?
Grimm's law is a proper noun.

Words near Grimm's law in the dictionary

  1. grimliest
  2. grimlike
  3. grimliness
  4. grimly
  5. Grimm
  6. Grimm's law
  7. Grimme
  8. grimmed
  9. grimmer
  10. Grimmers
  11. Grimmes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Grimm's law (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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Cite this entry: “Grimm's law.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/grimm%27s_law. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.