- 1慘不忍睹的、血腥可怕的
Gruesome means very unpleasant and shocking, in a way that has to do with someone being killed or badly hurt. A gruesome crime, a gruesome crash, a gruesome scene in a film: you can picture wounds, blood, or death. People do stretch it — they may call a nasty story gruesome even when nobody is hurt — but the centre of the word is horror about the body, not just 'I do not like this.' It is a strong word. A bad sandwich is not gruesome. The first piece, grue, is an old word from the north of England and from Scotland, meaning to shake with fear. The ending -some means 'full of that quality.' A writer called Walter Scott helped the word spread in the early 1800s.
From the word’s history
grue 'to shudder with fear' + -some; probably popularized by Walter Scott.
由 grue「發抖、害怕」加 -some 組成,可能因司各特而流行。
組成grue (old northern English and Scottish: to be frightened; to shudder with fear) + -some ('full of that quality').
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,摘錄並精簡格式,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
gruesomeadj/ˈɡɹuːsəm/
- 1
Repellently frightful and shocking; ghastly, horrific.
- He taks a ſvvirlie, auld moſs-oak, / For ſome black, grouſome Carlin; […]
- There's a wheen German horse doun at Glasgow yonder; they ca' their commander Wittybody, or some sic name, though he's as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e'er I saw.
- 2
informalAwful, terrible.
- The team was so unprepared that the way it played was just gruesome.
- 3
archaicrareOf a person: filled with fear; afraid, fearful.
- Then says I to myself,—"John Ridd, these trees, and pools, and lonesome rocks, and setting of the sunlight, are making a gruesome coward of thee. Shall I go back to my mother so, and be called her fearless boy?"
- Some of his [Nathaniel Hawthorne's] companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary,已精簡格式;依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用,改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。