Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To shiver; shudder; feel horror.
- (impersonal) To pain; grieve.
Wiktionary
- adj. philosophy Of an object, green when first observed before a specified time or blue when first observed after that time.
- adj. linguistics Green or blue, as a translation from languages such as Welsh that do not distinguish between these hues.
- v. intransitive, archaic To be frightened; to shudder with fear.
- n. A shiver, a shudder
- n. Any byproduct of a gruesome event, i.e. gore, viscera, entrails, blood and guts.
- n. A fictional predator that dwells in the dark.
Etymologies
- Probably from gruesome; first used in Jack Vance's Dying Earth universe, but popularized by the text-based computer game Zork (1980). (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Knowing that exactly such a ruinous retaliation was coming-and to people she liked, or even loved-gave her what her father called the grue: a cold sense of oppressive horror, coiling through the blood.”
“The military men wade deeper in grue, following the discovery of a Special Forces commander whose squad has been picked off by particularly unstoppable foes – werewolves the size of minivans.”
““new riddle of induction”, commonly called the grue paradox, invites us to consider the predicate grue, which is true before time t only of objects that are green and after time”
“Watch it for the grue, which is fantastically well-done (if hilariously improbable) and not for anything else - even the nudity is ruined by women turning into monsters.”
“The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth.”
“He had turned a complete somersault in the water beneath us, giving us a "grue" as we reflected what would have happened had he then chosen to come bounding to the surface.”
The Cruise of the Cachalot Round the World After Sperm Whales
“Drumsheugh was much shaken, and the sound of the Christian name, which he had not heard since his mother's death, gave him a "grue" (shiver), as if one had spoken from the other world.”
“Drumsheugh was much shaken, and the sound of the Christian name, which he had not heard since his mother's death, gave him a "grue”
“I think his focus was more on Japan (eg the color "grue" reflecting their lack of differentiation between grey from blue) but I'm sure enough of it would have applied to”
TravelPod.com TravelStream™ — Recent Entries at TravelPod.com
“Or "grue", which is used after the American philosopher Nelson Goodman to apply to all things examined before a certain time, t, just in case they are green, but to other things just in case they are blue.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘grue’.
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Words
phantasmagoria, eviscerate, avast, simulacrum, varicose, oblique, gestalt, ersatz, vernal, vivace, stellate, synecdoche and 330 more...
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animals (1 syllable)
A list of common animal names. Keep the list to 1 syllable words.No scientific names. No proper names like 'Fluffy' the elephant.Insects and other creatures (even ficticious) are welcome!You can ...
dog, cat, bear, bee, ass, ape, horse, squid, bug, hare, hawk, pig and 138 more...
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Pigment of Your Imagination
Mix and match the phonemes in colors!
bleen, grue, grink, blurple, silvorange, grack, lavendeen, blundigo, yelled, violink, blink, rue and 44 more...
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A List of Mythical Proportions
All of these things exist, I swear!
unicorn, pegasus, cyclops, yeti, abominable snowman, bigfoot, phoenix, thunderbird, sea serpent, ogre, grue, troll and 138 more...
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juv3nal's Words
ligature, hermeneutic, caduceus, prelapsarian, apophenia, pataphor, lipogram, epinephrine, ludic, samizdat, oulipo, oulipopo and 194 more...
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Twitter favorites
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favorite word" and adds it to this list.
See also:
grabbable, retuiteando, leaving, fantastic, absolutely, kurwa, hella, ridic, underpass, hate, interlude, plush and 2369 more... -
Fictional Colors
Is my red the same as your red?
fuligin, grue, bleen, hooloovoo, octarine, squant, ulfire, burnt ulfire
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Outlander series words
A place for me to keep words I found (or found anew) while reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. (Culling my enormous "Learned (or Encountered) in Reading" list.)
gralloch, yeuk, corpse-candle, saprophytic, baldachin, Kermanshah, celandine, tynchal, quaich, mesentery, basidium, dittany and 244 more...
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dann's words
just some nice words that i like.
beamish, snark, sundry, contrariwise, salsify, cephalopod, omphaloskepsis, grok, resistentialism, peristerophobia, aglet, ferrule and 125 more...
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Hiroe's Words
facetious, bardic, twatwaffle, cattywampus, splendiferous, zomg, merf, fwaa, fnord, tortify, schwiz, blort and 225 more...
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Some Words I Love to Use
arcology, strumpet, crux, confected, pedant, bluestocking, cogitation, incensed, lovecraftian, cygnet, dactyl, adytum and 539 more...
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grassdog's Words
schadenfreude, sanguine, nefarious, verisimilitude, antediluvian, salacious, obfuscate, plethora, cacophony, defenestration, vacillate, blasphemy and 478 more...
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Words of the Dying Earth
Tales of the Dying Earth is a 2002 anthology volume featuring four novels by Jack Vance: The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous.
Throughou...deodar, deodand, pelgrane, leucomorph, blister-bush, russet, black burdock, gunmetal, spatterlight, carrack, concertina, terce and 280 more...
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Philosophical Jargon
Words philosophical writers use to give the illusion of technical competence, including up-trippingly specialised senses of words that have other jobs during daylight hours.
akrasia, akrates, particularism, particularist, mereology, deontology, cognitivism, naturalism, anti-naturalism, ethics, phenomenology, metaethics and 220 more...
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Lurking in Lovecraft
Words I've encountered in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft or in S.T. Joshi's biography - "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life."
aegipan, interdicted, acidulous, eidolon, teratologically, squamous, vigintillion, miasmal, cenotaph, necrophagous, lambent, nefandous and 80 more...
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Words I like
aphrodisiac, mollify, disgruntle, schlep, woo, grue, nifty, foppish, ginormous, coddle, flibbertigibbet, hissyfit and 2 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for grue.
chained_bear "Still in the grip of a cold grue, I swung around and strained my eyes ... half expecting to see the scene engraved on my memory materialize again out of darkness...."
—Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn (NY: Dell, 1997), 250 Jan 19, 2010
yarb To expand, an object is grue if green and examined before time t, or blue and not examined before t. Oct 23, 2007
vanishedone 'It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.' (Zork)
Also a creation of Nelson Goodman. See also bleen. Oct 23, 2007
yarb The noise made by people feeling ill in children's comics in the 80's.
EDIT: ignore the above! The word I was thinking of was the homonym groo. Oct 23, 2007