Grasp

How to spell grasp

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grasp

What does grasp mean?

1. verbTo take and hold something firmly with the hand.
2. verbTo fully understand an idea or situation.
3. nounA firm hold or grip, or a person's understanding of something.

Grasp in a sentence

• verb

  She had to grasp the railing tightly on the icy steps.

• verb

  New staff often struggle to grasp the tax rules in their first week.

• noun

  The promotion felt within her grasp after years of hard work.

• verb

  He reached out to grasp the rope before it slipped away.

• verb

  It took her a while to grasp the full scope of the project.

• noun

  He has a solid grasp of the company finances.

Where does grasp come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Grasp comes from Middle English graspen, meaning 'to seize' or 'to clutch at', which appeared in writing around the 1300s. It is a Germanic word, almost certainly a metathesised form of the older verb grapsen, itself built on the same root that gives us 'grope' (the Old English grapian, 'to feel or touch about with the hands'). The idea running through all of these relatives is the hand reaching out and closing on something. From the literal sense of physically gripping, English speakers extended grasp to mean taking hold of an idea, so that by the late 1600s you could grasp a concept just as you grasp a rope. Its close cousin 'grapple' shares the same ancestry, which is a useful reminder that the word keeps a plain single 's' and never doubles, despite the firm 'sp' cluster at the end.

How the word is built

• grasp (a single Middle English root graspen meaning 'to seize'); no prefix or suffix, related to the verb 'grapple'