grotesqueadj/ɡɹəʊˈtɛsk/

• 1

  Distorted and unnatural in shape or size; abnormal, especially in a hideous way.

  • The chimney-piece was of party-coloured marble, covered with figures, some of whose faces were beautiful, but generally running off into those grotesque combinations which characterised the peculiar taste of their time.
  • A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisp locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase.
• 2

  Disgusting or otherwise viscerally revolting.

  • Trump’s grotesque and incomprehensible fondness for Putin makes the details of any deal highly dangerous for Europe and the NATO alliance, founded to confront Russia.
• 3

  mediapublishingtypographySans serif.

grotesquenoun/ɡɹəʊˈtɛsk/

• 1

  A style of ornamentation characterized by fanciful combinations of intertwined forms.

• 2

  Anything grotesque.

  • Obese and largely unintelligible, Don Vito represents a working-class white male grotesque, the picture of excess.
  • He’s also the new character from Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind Ali G, Borat and Brüno: that unholy trinity of comic grotesques that told us a lot more about ourselves than we’d like to admit.
• 3

  mediapublishingtypographyA sans serif typeface.

grotesqueverb/ɡɹəʊˈtɛsk/

• 1

  To make grotesque.

  • Why, when I saw that bestiality— / So beyond all brute-beast imagining, / That when, to point the moral at the close, / Poor Salabaccho, just to show how fair / Was ‘Reconciliation,’ stripped her charms, / That exhibition simply bade us breathe, / Seemed something healthy and commendable / After obscenity grotesqued so much / It slunk away revolted at itself.
  • This is to grotesque Dante, not to translate him.