grass
[ɡɹ̠äːs]
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.38 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as ground cover rather than for grain.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
An informer; snitch, police informer; one who betrays a group (of criminals, etc) to the authorities.
British usage; Countable; Slang
noun
Sharp, closely spaced discontinuities in the trace of a cathode-ray tube, produced by random interference.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Thou turnest man to destruction: and sayest, Returne yee children of men. / For a thousand yeeres in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past: and as a watch in the night. / Thou carriest them away as with a flood, they are as a sleepe: in the morning they are like grasse which groweth vp. / In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth vp: in the euening it is cut downe, and withereth."
- "The cicale above in the lime, / And the lizards below in the grass, / Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was, / Listening to my sweet pipings."
- "'Twas early June, the new grass was flourishing everywheres, the posies in the yard—peonies and such—in full bloom, the sun was shining, and the water of the bay was blue, with light green streaks where the shoal showed."
- "Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona / For some California grass"
- "What just happened must remain secret. Don't be a grass."
- "He was a grass and an arse lick and he didn't do it for him, he did it for his brother, because if Vaughan had hit him especially with his mallet, Mark was the kind of lowlife that would have pressed charges and then that's a whole different problem."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *gʰreh₁-der. Proto-Germanic *grasą Proto-West Germanic *gras Old English græs Middle English gras English grass Inherited from Middle English gras, from Old English græs, from Proto-West Germanic *gras, from Proto-Germanic *grasą (“grass”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰreh₁- (“to grow”). Cognates Cognate with Scots gress (“grass”), North Frisian gaars, geers, Gērs, gjars, gjas, gäärs (“grass”), Saterland Frisian Gäärs (“grass”), West Frisian gers (“grass”), Cimbrian gras, grass (“grass”), German and Luxembourgish Gras (“grass, weed”), Dutch gras (“grass, turf, pasture”), Mòcheno and Vilamovian gros (“grass”), West Flemish ges (“grass”), Yiddish גראָז (groz, “grass”), Danish græs (“grass”), Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian Nynorsk gras (“grass”), Norwegian Bokmål gras, gress (“grass”), Swedish gräs (“grass”), Gothic 𐌲𐍂𐌰𐍃 (gras, “herb”); also Latin herba (“plant, weed, grass”), Albanian grath (“grass blade, spike”). Related to grow, green. The "informer" sense is probably a shortening of grasshopper (“police officer, informant”), rhyming slang for copper (“police officer”) or shopper (“informant”); the exact sequence of derivation is unclear.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: [ɡɹ̠äːs]
- British English: [ɡɹ̠ɑːs]
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
Poaceae
Poaceae on Wikipedia.Wikipedia