Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. Scots To complain in a whining voice.
- v. Scots To contort one's face; grimace.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To grin; snarl.
- n. A grin.
- n. A yawn.
- n. A trap or snare for catching animals, birds, etc.: also used figuratively.
- To entrap or ensnare by, or as if by, a girn.
Wiktionary
- v. dialectal To grimace; to snarl.
- v. Scotland To whinge, moan, complain.
- v. intransitive To make elaborate unnatural and distorted faces as a form of amusement or in a girning competition.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. obsolete To grin.
Etymologies
- Metathesized form of grin. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English girnen, variant of grinnen, grennan; see grin. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“To wit: "And yet," says he, all chapfallen, "I fear me he will find occasion to clatter at my lady's ear, and mow and girn for his cracked pate to move her pity - and seest thou, father, it will look ill for me, a tenant oppressed crying Justice! and I can do nowt for him, wanting power at hand, and but the bailiff.”
“And then they stretch out their faces, and make mouths, and girn at me, and whichever way”
“Our board was full of words like larum and girn and ghat and revet.”
“Edinburgh, of course, was full of them, just as it was full of hills, biting winds, and people who liked to girn about things like hills and stairs and the wind ...”
“That's some o 'Robbie Boath's wark," he says in laich till himsel ', wi' an awfu 'girn on his face.”
“Contemporaries_: "Hunt has behaved like a hyena to Byron, whom he has dug up to girn and howl over him in the same breath.”
“There was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks, and at the back of that a terror, far more dignified than the protest to which it gave birth, at the dreadful things she knew would happen because she was disregarded, and a small, weak, guilty sense that she had not made her protest loudly and, perhaps, cleverly enough.”
“I won't girn any more if you'll court me," she promised.”
“Then your faither -- his God do sit everlastingly alongside hell-mouth, an 'laugh an' girn to see all the world a walkin 'in, same as the beasts walked in the”
“Dour an 'din he was, wi' ae girn like th 'auld hornie.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘girn’.
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It's a trap
trap, gin, snare, deadfall, trapezium, trapezoid, trappist, venus flytrap, foothold trap, trapping pit, glue trap, trap set and 98 more...
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Face Place ㋡
Facial expressions, methods for determining emotional states, and general terms for passionate emotional states.
I've put specific-emotion words in these other lists of mine:
Hap...perfervid, vehement, demonstrative, fervent, torrid, frantic, agog, choler, moue, histrionic, dacrygelosis, verklempt and 92 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1408 more...
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Words featured in Mrs. Byrne's Dictio...
Selections from Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words by Josefa Heifetz Byrne (University Books, 1974). Definitions in the comments when not available elsewhere.
apanthropy, anoetic, aristology, ayne, bibliopole, bibliotaph, calecannon, caoine, catlap, chirospasm, clamjamfry, coadunate and 174 more...
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The Other Side of Silence
A sound garden.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. --Walt Whitmantin cry, chark, gride, scroop, crepitation, stridulation, swazzle, death-ruckle, cronk, rumble, borborygmus, crowling and 165 more...
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A guid Scotch tongue
dreich, teuchter, crabbit, fankle, feart, ne'erday, skelp, haud yer wheesht, Jock Tamson's bairns, clype, gie it laldy, sleekit and 34 more...
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Four letter verbs
oust, hump, tonk, luff, girn, risp, dunk, cull, oink, purl, rort, bilk and 1 more...
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I've Been Cornobbled!
From Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader:
"You won't find these archaic words in most dictionaries, but take our word for it--they're real. And just for fun, try to use them in a ...hobberdehoy, faffle, dasypygal, cornobble, collieshangie, wem, calcographer, bodewash, twiddlepoop, liripoop, leptorrhinian, bridelope and 61 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for girn.
yarb Her voice changed, and he perceived that she was making use of the strange power to carry on disputes with the dead which is possessed by widows. The tone was a complete reconstruction of her marriage. There was a girn in it, as if she had learned to expect contradiction and disregard as the habitual response to all her remarks...
- Rebecca West, The Judge Jul 17, 2009
knitandpurl "Really, it was no concern of hers that Mr Cowper's relatives were girning yet again over the cost of his upkeep; it was one thing for a man to have a lackey — and Sam Roberts was an excellent servant — but it was piling Ossa on Pelion for them to learn that he also had a half-orphan boy attending on him."
--The Winner of Sorrow by Brian Lynch, p 85 Jul 12, 2009
tbtabby Verb: To bear one's teeth in anger or sadness. Jan 25, 2009