Grass

How to spell grass

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grass

What does grass mean?

1. nounThe common green ground-covering plant with narrow leaves, or an area covered by it.
2. nounBritish slang for a person who informs the police about criminals.
3. verbBritish slang meaning to inform the police about someone's wrongdoing.

Grass in a sentence

• noun

  He mowed the grass before the guests arrived for the barbecue.

• noun

  The gang suspected one of their own was a grass feeding tips to detectives.

• verb

  His accomplice threatened to grass on him if the money disappeared.

• noun

  The children kicked off their shoes and ran across the cool grass.

• noun

  Nobody on the estate would trust a known grass.

• verb

  The prisoner refused to grass on his former associates.

Where does grass come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Grass descends directly from the Old English noun gærs, also spelled græs, meaning the low green plants that cover open ground. It belongs to the same ancient Germanic family as Dutch gras and German Gras, and scholars link it to the same prehistoric root that gave us 'green' and 'grow', a fitting connection since grass is the very picture of growing greenery. That shared ancestry explains why the word has stayed so plain and short: it has been an everyday English word for well over a thousand years and never needed to be borrowed or reshaped. The metathesis (letter-swapping) seen in the old gærs/græs pair is the same kind of shuffle that turned 'bird' from earlier 'brid'. In modern British slang 'grass' also came to mean a police informer, possibly a clipping of rhyming slang 'grasshopper' for 'copper', and from that the verb 'to grass' on someone developed in the twentieth century.

How the word is built

• grass (Old English gærs/græs: green plant, herbage); a single unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix