grimy
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of grimy
Explanation
Grimy things are so dirty that it takes some scrubbing to clean them. You'll probably feel pretty grimy after a day spent trying to fix the engine of an old car. When something is grimy, the dirt is ingrained or set in, not just on the surface. Jobs that leave you covered in oil, tar, or dirt are grimy. If you wear gloves to transplant your grandma's flowers, you won't end up with grimy fingernails. The adjective grimy comes from grime, "ingrained dirt," which goes back to a root that means "to smear."
Vocabulary lists containing grimy
The Sea of Monsters
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The Battle of the Labyrinth
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My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
When Willy comes back from a quickly aborted road trip, he drives his car into an abandoned commercial garage, with pillars shedding tiles, gray lumps of detritus piled up, grimy windows letting in dim light.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 10, 2026
I thought of the name of Tom Wolfe’s then-recent final novel, “Back to Blood”: The world is going back to something basic, grimy and tribal.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 8, 2026
Cohn’s sound design also offered a taste of the grimy, intense New York of the 1970s, but he wanted to remain flexible in terms of period fidelity.
From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 6, 2025
She took a picture of the grimy hotel room where she stayed, capturing the swirling cursive on the sign for the dialysis center across the street in the background.
From Salon • Nov. 2, 2025
He looked up, his wet and grimy face.
From "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
