Word.ws English Dictionary

grip-and-grin

grip-and-grin noun: an event at which one is expected to smile and shake hands for a photograph.

grip-and-grin: an event at which one is expected to smile and shake hands for a photograph
Image: US Mission Canada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

grip-and-grin (plural grip-and-grins)

  1. (colloquial) An event at which one is expected to smile and shake hands for a photograph.
  2. (colloquial) A photograph of people looking towards the camera and smiling while they shake hands, typically taken at such an event.
    • Banning the king from Cop27 looks clumsy. News that Sunak could make a U-turn dash to Egypt having learned that Johnson may go looks panicky. If he only stays for a brief grip-and-grin, that too will offend.2022 November 1, Polly Toynbee, “Rishi Sunak’s only been in office for a few days – and the errors are already piling up”, in The Guardian

Forms of grip-and-grin

pluralgrip-and-grins

Questions about grip-and-grin

What does grip-and-grin mean?
Grip-and-grin means an event at which one is expected to smile and shake hands for a photograph.
What part of speech is grip-and-grin?
Grip-and-grin is a noun.
What is the plural of grip-and-grin?
The plural of grip-and-grin is grip-and-grins.

Words near grip-and-grin in the dictionary

  1. grip tape
  2. grip tapes
  3. grip up
  4. grip wax
  5. grip waxes
  6. grip-and-grin
  7. grip-and-grins
  8. grip-car
  9. grip-cars
  10. grip-lit
  11. gripe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: grip-and-grin (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: “grip-and-grin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/grip-and-grin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.