Grunt

How to spell grunt

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grunt

What does grunt mean?

1. verbTo make a short, low, throaty sound, often from effort, pain, or reluctance.
2. nounA short, low, throaty sound made by a person or animal.
3. nounInformal term for a low-ranking soldier or worker who does hard, routine labour.

Grunt in a sentence

• verb

  The movers grunt as they lifted the heavy sofa up the stairs.

• noun

  She answered his question with a single dismissive grunt.

• noun

  Every senior engineer started out as a grunt doing wiring jobs.

• verb

  He could only grunt in reply when the alarm woke him.

• noun

  A low grunt escaped him as he hauled the suitcase onto the rack.

• noun

  The film follows an ordinary infantry grunt through the campaign.

Where does grunt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Grunt comes from the Old English verb grunnettan, meaning to make a deep, throaty noise, which was a strengthened form of the simpler grunian carrying the same sense. These words are echoic in origin, meaning they were coined to imitate the very sound an animal or a tired person actually makes, much like 'grumble' and the Latin grunnire, 'to grunt', which described a pig. The Germanic family carried similar forms, and German still has grunzen for the noise a pig makes. The modern spelling stayed admirably short and phonetic, so the only real hazard is hearing the unstressed nasal and writing the simple four-letter form. In twentieth century military slang it took on the noun sense of a foot soldier or low-ranking worker, the person who does heavy, unglamorous labour.

How the word is built

• grunt (echoic root imitating a low guttural sound), no affixes