grewsome

comparative more grewsome · superlative most grewsome

1. obsoleteObsolete spelling of gruesome.First known use 19th c.

   It was rather a grewsome scene.

   1895, Henry Seton Merriman, The Sowers

   5 more examples

   There's a wheen German horse doun at Glasgow yonder; they ca' their commander Wittybody, or some sic name, though he's as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e'er I saw.

   1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter XII, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume I (The Black Dwarf), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]; London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 259

   [T]hey packed him [a dead duck] and sealed him up in brown paper, and put him in the cupboard of an unoccupied study, where he was found in the holidays by the matron, a grewsome body.

   1857, [Thomas Hughes], “The Bird-Fanciers”, in Tom Brown’s School Days. […], Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, part II, page 303

   [T]he dim, mysterious half-light of the cellar falling in a grewsome way upon the misshapen bulk of a Chinese deity in the background, […]

   1874 September, Bret Harte, “Wan Lee, the Pagan”, in Tales of the Argonauts, and Other Sketches, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company (late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.), published 1876, →OCLC, page 85

   True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country—the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine—but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.

   1889, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “The Battle of the Sand-belt”, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, New York, N.Y.: Charles L. Webster & Company, →OCLC, page 560

   His voice was hoarse and his unkempt head only added to its grewsome quality.

   1900, Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie