grisly
1 Americanadjective
-
causing a shudder or feeling of horror; horrible; gruesome.
a grisly murder.
-
formidable; grim.
a grisly countenance.
adjective
adjective
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of grisly
before 1150; Middle English; Old English grislīc horrible; cognate with Old High German grīsenlīh
Explanation
Grisly means disgusting and bloody, absolutely repulsive and horrible. There’s a wonderfully creepy movie about a man who suffers a grisly death at the hands of the grizzly bears he was studying. Do you like grisly horror movies? You might think that the reason the word grisly is so creepy, gruesome, and terrifying is somehow related to gristle, those really nasty tough parts you find in meat. But no, this is not the case. Old English grislic, the root of the word, means "horrible, dreadful." If something is gory and gross, it’s grisly.
Vocabulary lists containing grisly
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
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Ender's Game
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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.
See Examples For:
The focus so far as been on devolution, the grisly state of the country's books and the security threats the UK faces.
From BBC ● Jul. 4, 2026
It’s a grisly, funny ritual in which they reveal the self-disgust that their menial jobs have inculcated in them.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 28, 2026
"I did think it was a bit grisly but I was mostly intrigued," he says.
From BBC ● Mar. 22, 2026
The setup of this animated film sounds like a gag: A Viking, a ninja and a World War II pilot are thrown into a Predator movie that plays like a grisly triptych.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 10, 2026
Now the idea of leaving Sahel to lie here in the dirt, as alone as he’d been in the last grisly seconds of his life, unsettled her.
From "Beasts of Prey" by Ayana Gray
The S&P 500 has lost 12 percent on the year, but Tesla has lost a much grislier 40 percent.
From Slate ● Apr. 22, 2025
Perhaps the point is in the impressive discipline of the filmmaking, though if anything, given its premise, the movie wants to be a grislier, more nastily unhinged piece of work than it manages.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 1, 2023
Tate’s own children described a grislier scene inside the trailer.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 17, 2022
Walking through a bustling Montgomery Ward department store days before Christmas in 1972, he found inspiration for a grislier kind of movie in a display of gleaming chain saws.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 28, 2017
The Residency is a fine large building in an advanced stage of decomposition; the glorious vegetation around it—cotton-trees, caoutchouc-figs, and magnificent oleanders—making the pile look grimmer and grislier.
From To the Gold Coast for Gold A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Volume I by Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
“Yee’s play is a fierce, gorgeous, heartwarming, comedic fairy tale set against one of history’s grisliest mass extinctions,” wrote Margaret Gray in her review for The Times in 2018.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 9, 2024
Still, the grisliest details are about how these botched investigations can lead to dubious results and months-long delays in death certificates, which take a toll on families.
From Slate ● May 20, 2019
Watson had just mentioned one of the grisliest parts of her rehabilitation after she tore her right anterior cruciate ligament and lateral meniscus in January: “the bending process.”
From Washington Post ● Nov. 17, 2018
On Tuesday, both the press and public galleries were filled to capacity with an audience to what will likely be the grisliest day of trial expected to last for 15 days.
From Time ● Oct. 25, 2016
Because of this cold reality, most jockeys would ride through virtually anything, and they shrugged off the grisliest injuries.
From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand
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.
