gripple means griping; tenacious; gripping. It carries an Arena rating of 1560, earned across 77 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, gripple ranks #711 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #1,201 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say, #1,581 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #2,295 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound.
gripple is pronounced /ˈɡɹɪpəl/.
Why “gripple” is a great word
GRIPPLE — [Adjective, Noun] As an adjective, it means avaricious or miserly, or secondarily, gripping or sprained; as a noun, it is a ditch, drain, or hook. From Middle English gripel, from Old English gripol, gripul ("able to grasp much; capacious"), equivalent to grip + -le (a suffix forming adjectives). Unlike "parsimonious," which suggests careful, perhaps prideful frugality, or "grapple," which describes a physical struggle or tool, gripple is the tight-fisted avarice that is both an internal character and a physical constriction—it is the narrowed eyes calculating a split bill, the arthritic clench of a hand around a coin, and the choked, muddy ditch that hoards stagnant water. To be gripple is to have a soul that is itself a hook.
Etymology
From Middle English gripel, from Old English gripol, gripul (“able to grasp much; capacious”); equivalent to grip + -le.
adj
- Griping; tenacious; gripping.
- Grasping; greedy; snatchy; mean; niggardly; avaricious, covetous.e.g.“Still as he rode, he gnasht his teeth to see
Those heapes of gold with griple Covetyse” — 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- Sprained.
noun
- A ditch; a drain.
- A hook.
- A grasp; a grip.e.g.“Ne ever Artegall his griple strong / For any thing wold slacke, but still upon him hong.” — 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
verb
- To grasp or grab.e.g.“'If owt comes to Mulvaaney 'long o' you, I'll gripple you, clouts or no clouts on your ugly head, an' I'll draw t' throat twistyways, man. See there now.'” — 1889, Rudyard Kipling, Life's Handicap, The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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