Word.ws English Dictionary

grue

/ɡɹuː/

grue verb: to be frightened; also, to shudder with fear; to quake, to tremble.

Verb

grue (third-person singular simple present grues, present participle gruing or grueing, simple past and past participle grued)

  1. (Scotland, intransitive, archaic except Northern England) To be frightened; also, to shudder with fear; to quake, to tremble.
    • ["]I would have done Mr. Mordaunt's bidding too," he added, relaxing from his note of defiance, into the deferential whining tone with which he cajoled his customers, "if he hadna made use of profane oaths which made my very flesh grue, and caused me, in some sort, to forget myself."1822, [Walter Scott], The Pirate. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., →OCLC, pages 111–112

Noun (1)

grue (plural grues)

  1. (Scotland) A shiver, a shudder.
    • Upon all others the sight of Alison, were it but for a moment, cast a cold grue, not to be remembered without terror.1902, John Buchan, The Outgoing of the Tide
    • A Grue of Ice1964, Geoffrey Jenkins, (title)

Noun (2)

grue (uncountable)

  1. Any byproduct of a gruesome event, such as gore, viscera, entrails, blood and guts.
    • The butcher was covered in the accumulated grue of a hard day's work
    • There was grue everywhere after the accident

Noun (3)

grue (plural grues)

  1. A fictional man-eating predator that dwells in the dark.
    • I managed to get into the house through the front once, but I was plunged into darkness and eaten by a monster called a grue.1981, Byte, volume 6
    • To find a grue, turn off the light at night, or go for a walk in a dark place (but carry a flashlight with you).2009, Jas, “Hazadous ^([sic]) Australian animals the GRUE.... your guide”, in rec.travel.australia+nz (Usenet)

Adjective

grue (not comparable)

  1. Of an object, green when first observed before a specified time or blue when first observed after that time.
    • The grue property is defined as: x is grue if and only if x is green and is observed before the year 2000, or x is blue and is not observed before the year 2000.1965, Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast
    • The unexamined emeralds cannot be both green and grue, since if they are grue and unexamined they are blue.2007, Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z
  2. Of a single color inclusive of both green and blue as different shades, used in translations from languages such as Old Welsh and Old Chinese that did not always distinguish between green and blue.

Noun (4)

grue (uncountable)

  1. The property of being green when first observed before a specified time or blue when first observed after that time.
    • [T]he color grue would change in color. Colors do not do this; so ‘grue’ cannot be a color term.1994, Rita Nolan, “Discursive Practices”, in Cognitive Practices: Human Language and Human Knowledge, Oxford, Oxfordshire; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, →ISBN, note 1, page 155
    • Philosophers made their points with thought experiments—[…] the color grue; […]2001, Bruce Kuklick, “Conclusion”, in A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000, Oxford, Oxfordshire; New York, N.Y.: Clarendon Press, →ISBN, page 283
  2. A single color inclusive of both green and blue as different shades, used in translations from languages such as Old Welsh and Old Chinese that did not always distinguish between green and blue.
    • Grue is the last of the composite categories that languages lose; hence its frequency. The transition to Stage V, where all basic color categories are primary, occurs when grue is replaced by its component primaries blue and green.1978 September, Paul Kay, Chad K. McDaniel, “The Linguistic Significance of the Meanings of Basic Color Terms”, in Language, volume 54, number 3, Washington, D.C.: Linguistic Society of America...
    • Our third hypothesis supposes that grue is based primarily on green but includes blues at lower membership. This hypothesis, the “skewed” grue, is illustrated in Figure 3d.1985, Don Burgess, Willett Kempton, Robert E. MacLaury, “Tarahumara Color Modifiers: Individual Variation and Evolutionary Change”, in Janet W. D. Dougherty, editor, Directions in Cognitive...

Noun (5)

grue (uncountable)

  1. (slang) Nutraloaf, a bland mixture of foods served in prisons.

Proper noun capitalized: Grue

Grue

  1. A municipality of Innlandet, Norway, formerly part of the county of Hedmark.

grue meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Thai and Vietnamese

grue in Tamil

பச்சை

grue in Urdu

پھریری

grue in Thai

linguistics: green or blue in languages that do not distinguish the two colors
เขียว kǐao

grue in Vietnamese

linguistics: green or blue in languages that do not distinguish the two colors
xanh

Examples of grue in a sentence

  • A cold grue went through me—I was unable to touch such a hand.1992, Alasdair Gray, Poor Things, Bloomsbury, published 2002, page 25:
  • 'Just after he had shown me the family skeletons.' / 'What a lovely bit of grue!'1958, Samuel Youd, writing as John Christopher, The Caves of Night:
  • King’s adolescent joy in grimaces and groans, the Mad magazine humor, and the staple of “grue” hardly need mentioning.1996, Linda Badley, Writing Horror and the Body http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=iaHQorgoqd4C&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&sig=0unz5oiZA5IURViNe75...
  • Incidentally, the best official text description I know of is in Sorcerer, when you actually become a grue and visit a grue colony.2004, M.D. Dollahite, “How would you imagine a grue?”, in rec.games.int-fiction (Usenet):

Forms of grue

Verb
third-person singular presentgrues
present participlegruing
present participlegrueing
past participlegrued
pastgrued
Noun
pluralgrues

Origin of grue

From Middle English gruen, probably from Middle Low German gruwen or Middle Dutch gruwen (compare Dutch gruwen), both from Proto-Germanic *grūwijaną, perhaps ultimately an imitative derivative of Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰers- (“to bristle”), or instead from *gʰer- (“to rub, stroke, grind”).

Back-formation from gruesome.

Probably from gruesome; first used in Jack Vance's Dying Earth universe in the 1940s, but popularized by the text-based computer game Zork in 1980.

Words formed from grue

Phrases with grue

Words that rhyme with grue

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about grue

What does grue mean?
Grue means to be frightened; also, to shudder with fear; to quake, to tremble.
What is grue in Tamil?
Grue in Tamil is பச்சை. See Grue meaning in Tamil.
How do you use grue in a sentence?
A cold grue went through me—I was unable to touch such a hand.
What part of speech is grue?
Grue can be a verb, a noun, an adjective or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce grue?
Grue is pronounced /ɡɹuː/.
What is the past tense of grue?
The past tense of grue is grued.

Words near grue in the dictionary

  1. grudgy
  2. gruds
  3. Grudzinski
  4. Grudzinskis
  5. Grudziądz
  6. grue
  7. grue jay
  8. grue jays
  9. grued
  10. grueing
  11. gruel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: grue (page history and authors); Grue (page history and authors); grue (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); grue (Urdu 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-grue.ogg.

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