gruesome

comparative gruesomer · comparative more gruesome · superlative gruesomest · superlative most gruesome · alternative grewsome

1. Repellently frightful and shocking; ghastly, horrific.

   He taks a ſvvirlie, auld moſs-oak, / For ſome black, grouſome Carlin; […]

   1785 (date written), Robert Burns, “Halloween”, in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. […], 2nd edition, volume I, Edinburgh: […] T[homas] Cadell, […], and William Creech, […], published 1793, →OCLC, stanza XXIII, page 189

   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

   With many a grausome shape unutterable, / Limn'd were the cavernous sepulchral walls; […]

   1848, [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], “Book V”, in King Arthur. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, stanza XLIX, page 219

   He has taken a bride / To his gruesome side, / That's as fair as himself is bold: […]

   1855, Robert Browning, “A Lovers’ Quarrel”, in Men and Women […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, stanza 5, page 9

   [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

   Synonyms: grisly, horrible, affreux, alarming, spine-tingling, appalling, awful, eldritch · Antonyms: ungruesome

2. broadlyinformalAwful, terrible.

   The team was so unprepared that the way it played was just gruesome.

   Synonyms: abysmal, atrocious, awful, bad, chronic, coarse, corny, crap · Antonyms: acceptable, agreeable, all right, amazing, as fine as Dick's hatband, awesome, beatific, bene

3. archaicrareOf a person: filled with fear; afraid, fearful.

   Then says I to myself,—"John Ridd, these trees, and pools, and lonesome rocks, and setting of the sunlight, are making a gruesome coward of thee. Shall I go back to my mother so, and be called her fearless boy?"

   1869, R[ichard] D[oddridge] Blackmore, chapter VII, in Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. […], volume I, London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, […], →OCLC, page 82

   1 more example

   Some of his [Nathaniel Hawthorne's] companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes.

   1879, Henry James, Junr., “Brook Farm and Concord”, in John Morley, editor, Hawthorne (English Men of Letters; 13), London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 87

   Synonyms: afeared, afraid, alarmed, anxious, apprehensive, chicken, concerned, creeped out · Antonyms: unafraid, unruffled, unterrified