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grunt

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ɡɹʌnt//
  • //ɡɹʊnt//

A short snorting sound, often to show disapproval, or used as a reply when one is reluctant to speak.

noun

  1. 1

    A short snorting sound, often to show disapproval, or used as a reply when one is reluctant to speak.

    The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put his legs up on the settle that he had to himself.

  2. 2

    The snorting cry of a pig.

  3. 3

    Any fish of the perciform family Haemulidae.

  4. 4

    A person who does ordinary and boring work.

  5. 5

    slangAn infantry soldier.

    The poges stare at the grunts as though the grunts were Hell's Angels at the ballet.

    The events described are those encountered by only 160 men, though the adversity recounted is representative of that experienced by all grunts in Vietnam.

    He can't make that kind of decision. He's just a grunt!

  6. 6

    slangThe amount of power of which a vehicle is capable.

    The engine might not possess quite as much grunt as the later 24v six, but it delivers invigorating performance […]

    With this much grunt, it is surprising that the engine is relatively quiet.

    The lack of bottom-end grunt presents as a particular problem in hilly terrain where the five-speed manual gearbox really earns its keep.

  7. 7

    A dessert of steamed berries and dough, usually blueberries; blueberry grunt.

Etymology

From Middle English grunten, from Old English grunnettan (“to grunt”), from Proto-West Germanic *grunnattjan, from Proto-Germanic *grunnatjaną (“to grunt”), frequentative of Proto-Germanic *grunnōną (“to grunt”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrun- (“to shout”). Cognate with German grunzen (“to grunt”), Danish grynte (“to grunt”). The noun senses are all instances of zero derivation from the verb.

verb

  1. 1

    To make a grunt or grunts.

    to grunt and sweat under a weary life

    The silhouette sharpens and fades as the carving is moved before the flames of the hearth, its maker grunts in perfect imitation of the ancestor - a human-lioness in oestrus.

  2. 2

    To make a grunt or grunts.

  3. 3

    slangTo break wind; to fart.

    Who just grunted?

Forms

plural
grunts
past tense
grunted
past participle
grunted
present participle
grunting
third person singular
grunts
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).