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grit

Pronunciation: /ɡɹɪt/

The English word “grit” has 11 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A collection of hard small materials, such as dirt, ground stone, debris from sandblasting or other such grinding, or swarf from metalworking.
  2. Sand or a sand–salt mixture spread on wet and, especially, icy roads and footpaths to improve traction.
  3. Small, hard, inedible particles in food.
  4. A measure of the size of abrasive grains, such as those on sandpaper, and thus their relative coarseness or fineness; the smaller the number, the coarser the abrasive: thus, 60 is rough, 600 is fine, and 3000 is ultrafine.
  5. A hard, coarse-grained siliceous sandstone; gritstone. Also, a finer sharp-grained sandstone, e.g., grindstone grit.
  6. Strength of mind; courage or fearlessness; fortitude.
  7. Husked but unground oats.
  8. Coarsely ground corn or hominy used as porridge.

verb

  1. To clench (one's teeth), particularly in reaction to pain or anger.
  2. To cover with grit.
  3. To give forth a grating sound, like sand under the feet; to grate; to grind.

Etymology

With early modern vowel shortening, from Middle English grete, griet, from Old English grēot, from Proto-West Germanic *greut, from Proto-Germanic *greutą. Compare grist.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.