Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Minute rough granules, as of sand or stone.
  • noun The texture or fineness of sand or stone used in grinding.
  • noun A coarse hard sandstone used for making grindstones and millstones.
  • noun Informal Indomitable spirit; pluck.
  • intransitive verb To clamp (the teeth) together.
  • intransitive verb To cover or treat with grit.
  • intransitive verb To make a grinding noise.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The coarse part of meal.
  • noun plural Oats or wheat hulled or coarsely ground; small particles of broken grain; sizings: as, oaten or wheaten grits.
  • A Scotch variant of great.
  • noun Sand or gravel; rough hard particles collectively.
  • noun Soil; earth.
  • noun In geology, any silicious rock of which the particles have sharp edges, so that it can be used for grinding.
  • noun The structure of a stone in regard to fineness and closeness or their opposites: as, a hone of fine grit.
  • noun Firmness of mind; courage; spirit; resolution; determination; pluck.
  • noun In Canada, an extreme Liberal: so called by the opposite party.
  • To give forth a grating sound, as of sand under the feet; grate.
  • To grate; grind: as, to grit the teeth.
  • noun A kind of crawfish; the sea-crab.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To give forth a grating sound, as sand under the feet; to grate; to grind.
  • transitive verb Collog. To grind; to rub harshly together; to grate.
  • noun Sand or gravel; rough, hard particles.
  • noun The coarse part of meal.
  • noun Grain, esp. oats or wheat, hulled and coarsely ground; in high milling, fragments of cracked wheat smaller than groats.
  • noun (Geol.) A hard, coarse-grained siliceous sandstone; ; -- called also gritrock and gritstone. The name is also applied to a finer sharp-grained sandstone.
  • noun Structure, as adapted to grind or sharpen.
  • noun Firmness of mind; invincible spirit; unyielding courage; fortitude.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun usually in plural husked but unground oats
  • noun usually in plural coarsely ground corn or hominy used as porridge
  • noun Collection of hard small materials, such as dirt, ground stone, debris from sandblasting or other such grinding, swarf from metalworking.
  • noun Inedible particles in food.
  • noun A character trait that encompasses courage, fearlessness, or guts.
  • noun A measure of relative coarseness of an abrasive material such as sandpaper.
  • verb To clench, particularly in reaction to pain or anger; apparently only appears in gritting one's teeth.
  • verb To cover with grit.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb cover with a grit
  • noun fortitude and determination
  • verb clench together
  • noun a hard coarse-grained siliceous sandstone

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English gret, sand, from Old English grēot.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English gryt ‘bran, chaff’, from Old English grytt, from Proto-Germanic *grutjan ‘coarsely ground bits’ (compare Dutch grut, German Grütze), ablaut variant of Proto-Indo-European *gʰr-eu-d-. See above.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

With early modern vowel shortening, from Middle English grete, griet, from Old English grēot, from Proto-Germanic *greutan (compare German Grieß, Swedish gryta), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰr-eu-d- (compare Lithuanian grúodas ‘frost; frozen street dirt’, Serbo-Croatian grȕda ‘lump’).

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Examples

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  • Citation (as verb of sound / motion) on pung.

    April 3, 2010