Bluegrass

How to spell bluegrass

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bluegrass

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bluegrass mean?

1. nounA style of American country music featuring banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and rapid acoustic string playing.
2. nounA pasture and lawn grass of the genus Poa, noted for its dense growth and bluish seed heads.

Bluegrass in a sentence

• The festival closed with a fast bluegrass set led by a banjo and a fiddle.

• The golf course reseeded the fairways with hardy bluegrass each autumn.

• He learned to play bluegrass on a borrowed mandolin in his twenties.

• Cattle grazed contentedly on the rolling fields of bluegrass.

Where does bluegrass come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound of two very old words: 'blue', which reached English through Old French 'bleu' but ultimately rests on a Germanic root for the colour, and 'grass', a thoroughly native Old English word 'græs' that simply meant the green ground plant. The name was first applied in North America to several pasture and lawn grasses of the genus Poa, whose dense growth and bluish-tinged seed heads give whole fields a faintly blue cast in early summer. The fertile limestone region of central Kentucky became known as the Bluegrass country because of these pastures, and from there the word travelled into music. In the 1940s the mandolin player Bill Monroe named his band the Blue Grass Boys after his home state, and their fast, string-driven style came to be called bluegrass music. The spelling stays simple because both halves are common everyday words; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, not two.

How the word is built

• blue (the colour)
• grass (Old English græs); a compound noun