Grouse

How to spell grouse

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grouse

What does grouse mean?

1. nounA plump game bird with feathered legs, hunted on moorland and in woodland.
2. verbTo grumble or complain in a persistent, low-level way.
3. nounA grumble or minor complaint.

Grouse in a sentence

• noun

  The estate opens its moors for grouse shooting in mid August.

• verb

  The staff began to grouse about the new parking charges.

• noun

  Her main grouse was the lack of decent coffee in the office.

• noun

  A single grouse broke cover and flew low across the heather.

• verb

  He will grouse about the weather no matter the season.

• noun

  The survey gave employees a chance to air every grouse they had.

Where does grouse come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The bird name grouse appears in English in the early 1500s, and its origin is genuinely murky; the spelling first shows up in a royal household ordinance of 1531. One plausible thread links it to the medieval Latin word grūta, used for a similar game bird, while another connects it to Old French grue, meaning 'crane', though neither chain is firmly proven. Curiously, the early spelling 'grows' or 'grouse' may originally have been a plural that was later treated as a singular, which is part of why the word stayed unchanged in the plural even today. The quite separate verb grouse, meaning to grumble or complain, is a much later arrival from around the 1850s, surfacing in British army slang; its source is also uncertain but is often tied to the Old French grouchier 'to murmur or grumble', the same root that gave us 'grudge' and 'grouch'. Because the origins on both sides are doubtful, the safest summary is that grouse is an old English word of unknown ancestry whose 'ou' spelling has simply been inherited rather than logically derived.

How the word is built

• grouse (single root; no productive prefix or suffix), a word of obscure origin first recorded for the game bird