Grizzlies

How to spell grizzlies

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce grizzlies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does grizzlies mean?

1. nounLarge brown bears of western North America, named for the silver-tipped, greyish look of their fur.

Grizzlies in a sentence

• The park rangers warned hikers that grizzlies had been spotted near the river.

• The documentary followed a family of grizzlies through their summer in the mountains.

Where does grizzlies come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the plural of grizzly, a word that grew out of grizzle, an old term for the colour grey or for hair streaked with grey. Grizzle itself came into English from the Old French grisel, a diminutive built on gris, meaning 'grey', and that French word in turn traces back to a Germanic root for the same dull colour. By the 1800s North American settlers were calling the great silver-tipped bears of the western mountains grizzly bears, because the white-frosted tips of their brown fur gave them a grizzled, greying appearance. Over time grizzly came to stand alone as a noun, and grizzlies became the everyday plural. The spelling trap lives in the doubled z and the switch from -y to -ies, since the word looks as if it might share roots with grisly (meaning gruesome), which it does not.

How the word is built

• grizzl- (from grizzle: grey, streaked with grey)
• -y (adjective/noun)
• -es (plural of words ending -y)