Grit

How to spell grit

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grit

What does grit mean?

1. nounSmall, loose particles of stone, sand, or similar abrasive material.
2. nounCourage, determination, and stubborn endurance in the face of difficulty.
3. verbTo clench the teeth together, or to spread abrasive material on a surface.

Grit in a sentence

• noun

  A piece of grit worked its way into her shoe during the walk.

• noun

  Finishing the marathon on an injured ankle took real grit.

• verb

  She would grit her teeth and push through the last hour of the shift.

• noun

  The council spreads grit on the roads before a hard frost.

• noun

  The coach praised the team for their grit in the closing minutes.

• verb

  Crews work overnight to grit the motorways when snow is forecast.

Where does grit come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a genuinely old native word, descending from the Old English greot, which meant sand, gravel, or fine particles of earth. That root belonged to a wider Germanic family, related to forms in Old Norse and Old High German that all gathered around the idea of something gritty and granular. For most of its life the word stayed firmly literal, naming the coarse grains underfoot or the abrasive dust caught between the teeth. The now common figurative meaning, courage and stubborn endurance, only emerged in the early nineteenth century, with American writers picturing the person of strong character as having the same hard, unyielding texture as stone. Because it is a short, phonetically regular word, the spelling has barely changed, and the modern grit sits very close to its thousand-year-old ancestor.

How the word is built

• grit (from Old English greot: sand, gravel, dust); no affixes, a single native root