grunge
Americannoun
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dirt; filth; rubbish.
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something of inferior quality; trash.
He didn't know good music from grunge.
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a person who works hard, usually for meager rewards; grind.
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a style or fashion derived from a movement in rock music: in fashion characterized by unkempt clothing and in music by aggressive, nihilistic songs.
noun
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slang dirt or rubbish
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a style of rock music originating in the US in the late 1980s, featuring a distorted guitar sound
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a deliberately untidy and uncoordinated fashion style
Etymology
Origin of grunge
1960–65; expressive coinage, perhaps reflecting grime and sludge; sense “grind” perhaps by association with drudge
Explanation
Grunge is a grimy, sooty, or otherwise dirty state. The grunge of a rented cabin might have you re-thinking your plans to camp there all weekend. You may romanticize the idea of working on cars at a garage, including the grunge under your fingernails. Grunge is dirt and grime, or the condition of being covered in it. In the mid-1980s, the word was loaned to a new kind of underground music, and the style and culture surrounding it. Mark Arm, the lead singer for a Seattle band, is usually credited with coining this meaning of grunge when he wrote in a 1981 zine, "Pure grunge! Pure noise!"
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.
And while it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves, its concurrence with the height of the Seattle grunge music scene made the disheveled aesthetic a street-style must-have.
From Salon • Mar. 27, 2026
Yet long before earning all these accolades, Shakira was a teen girl in Baranquilla, Colombia, waiting in line at her local record store for a copy of Nirvana’s 1991 grunge magnum opus, “Nevermind.”
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 18, 2026
Their signature sound, much like the East L.A. neighborhood they grew up in, is a melting pot of influences, combining old-school cumbias, ’90s grunge, and psychedelic rock into something completely unique to them.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 11, 2026
The instrument also paved the way to an aesthetics of electricity—feedback, distortion, fuzz, sheer volume—that led to such genres as heavy metal, punk, grunge and shoegaze.
From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 14, 2026
Each section has its own era-defining poster: Nevermind by Nirvana for grunge.
From "The Sun Is Also a Star" by Nicola Yoon
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.
