Word.ws English Dictionary

gristles

gristles is the plural of gristle.

Meaning of gristle

Noun

gristle (countable and uncountable, plural gristles)

  1. Cartilage; now especially: cartilage present, as a tough substance, in meat.
    • When you're chewing on life's gristle
      Don't grumble, give a whistle
      And this'll help things turn out for the best[…]1979, Monty Python, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”
  2. (figuratively) Bone not yet hardened by age and hard work.
    • And it is a hard and cruel thing thus in early youth to taste beforehand the pangs which should be reserved for the stout time of manhood, when the gristle has become bone, and we stand up and fight out our lives, as a thing tried before and foreseen; for then we are veterans used to sieges and...1849, Herman Melville, “chapter II”, in Redburn: His First Voyage. […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC

Questions about gristles

What is gristles the plural of?
Gristles is the plural of gristle.

Words near gristles in the dictionary

  1. gristing
  2. gristle
  3. gristlehead
  4. gristleheads
  5. gristleless
  6. gristles
  7. gristlier
  8. gristliest
  9. gristliness
  10. gristly
  11. gristmill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gristles (page history and authors); gristle (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)-Wodencafe-gristles.wav.

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