Word.ws English Dictionary

nitty-gritty

Syllables: nit·ty-grit·tyUK/ˌnɪtiˈɡɹɪti//ˈnɪtiˈɡɹɪti/

nitty-gritty noun: the core or essence of something; the gist.

Noun

nitty-gritty (uncountable)

  1. (also, attributive, colloquial) The core or essence of something; the gist.
    • He gave a short summary without getting into the nitty-gritty of the problem.
    Synonyms:
    brass tacks, nuts and bolts, bowels, sum, core, crux, essence, gist, drift, guts

Adjective

nitty-gritty (comparative more nitty-gritty, superlative most nitty-gritty)

  1. (colloquial) Dealing with something in great depth.
    • We deal with them at a very, very nitty gritty level, and we deal with the results of years and years of problems that they've had in the past.1976, United States. National Commission on Arthritis and Related Musculoskeletal Diseases, Arthritis - Out of the Maze

nitty-gritty meaning in Malayalam and Persian

nitty-gritty in Malayalam

fundamentals, basics, essentials
അടിസ്ഥാനവസ്തുതകൾ, മൗലികപ്രമാണങ്ങൾ, അടിസ്ഥാനപാഠങ്ങൾ, മൂലതത്ത്വങ്ങൾ, അടിസ്ഥാന ഘടകങ്ങൾ, മൂലതത്വങ്ങൾ

nitty-gritty in Persian

core or essence of something — see also gist
اصول osul

Synonyms of nitty-gritty

19 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of nitty-gritty

Forms of nitty-gritty

Noun
alternative formknitty-gritty
alternative formnitty gritty
Adjective
comparativemore nitty-gritty
superlativemost nitty-gritty

Origin of nitty-gritty

Of uncertain origin; said to have been first used by black jazz musicians from the United States, the word is perhaps a reduplication of gritty (“resembling grit”) (ultimately from Proto-Germanic *greutą (“grit”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrewd-) with alteration of the first syllable. An urban legend links the origin of the word to the debris remaining in the holds of slave ships after the slaves had been disembarked, but there is no evidence for this. The word is not attested early enough to have been associated with slavery.

Words formed from nitty-gritty

Phrases with nitty-gritty

Words that rhyme with nitty-gritty

24 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about nitty-gritty

What does nitty-gritty mean?
Nitty-gritty means the core or essence of something; the gist.
What is nitty-gritty in Malayalam?
Nitty-gritty in Malayalam is അടിസ്ഥാനവസ്തുതകൾ, മൗലികപ്രമാണങ്ങൾ, അടിസ്ഥാനപാഠങ്ങൾ. See Nitty-gritty meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is nitty-gritty?
Nitty-gritty can be a noun or an adjective.
How do you pronounce nitty-gritty?
Nitty-gritty is pronounced /ˌnɪtiˈɡɹɪti/ (UK).

Words near nitty-gritty in the dictionary

  1. Nitto
  2. Nittolo
  3. Nittolos
  4. nitty
  5. nitty gritty
  6. nitty-gritty
  7. nitwit
  8. nitwits
  9. nitwitted
  10. nitwittedly
  11. nitwittedness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nitty-gritty (page history and authors); nitty-gritty (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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: En-us-nitty-gritty.ogg.

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