Word of the Day

: April 21, 2018

grudging

adjective GRUH-jing

What It Means

1 : unwilling, reluctant

2 : done, given, or allowed unwillingly, reluctantly, or sparingly

grudging in Context

"The class differences between teacher and students are so pronounced that they threaten to plunge the film into a schoolhouse drama—that well-worn genre in which a charismatic authority figure, inevitably likable yet inevitably tough, gains her students' grudging respect and eventual trust." — Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times, 22 Mar. 2018

"There is no grudging marriage of art and politics in her work; as John Berger, one of her longtime interlocutors and a formative influence, wrote, 'Far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics.' [Arundhati] Roy's work conveys a similar spirit." — Parul Sehgal, The Atlantic, 17 June 2017

Did You Know?

In the 15th century, English jurist Sir John Fortescue observed, "Somme . . . obtayne gretter rewardis than thei have disserved, and yit grugge, seying they have [too] litill." Fortescue's grugge (an early spelling of the verb grudge) meant "to grumble and complain," just like its Middle English forerunner, grucchen, and the Anglo-French word grucer, which gave rise to the English forms. English speakers had adopted the "complain" sense of grudge by the late 13th century, and a century later they had added the extended sense "to give reluctantly." That second sense may have developed because people associated grudge with the related word begrudge (meaning "to give reluctantly," as in "I begrudged him a second chance.") Grudging, which developed from grudge, made its English debut in the 1530s.