grue

Meanings

Verb

• To be frightened; to shudder with fear.

Noun

• A shiver, a shudder.
• Any byproduct of a gruesome event, such as gore, viscera, entrails, blood and guts.
• A fictional man-eating predator that dwells in the dark.
• Nutraloaf, a bland mixture of foods served in prisons.

Adjective

• Of an object, green when first observed before a specified time or blue when first observed after that time.
• Green or blue, as a translation from languages such as Welsh that do not distinguish between these hues.

Origin

• From Middle English gruen, probably from Middle Low German gruwen or Middle Dutch gruwen (compare Dutch gruwen), both from Proto-Germanic *grūwijaną, perhaps ultimately an imitative derivative of Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰers-, or instead from *gʰer-.
• Probably from gruesome; first used in Jack Vance's Dying Earth universe in the 1940s, but popularized by the text-based computer game Zork in 1980.
• . Coined by Nelson Goodman to illustrate concepts in the philosophy of science.