grig

• IPA^(key): /ɡɹɪɡ/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪɡ
• Homophone: Grigg

The word is often used in the phrase "merry as a grig". The word is of uncertain origin, though various theories have been suggested, such as a corruption of "merry as a cricket" or "merry as a Greek", as in William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: "Then she's a merry Greek indeed." Johnson suggested that the word originally meant "anything below the natural size" (compare Swedish krik and Scots crick).

grig (plural grigs)

1. (obsolete) A dwarf.
2. A cricket or grasshopper.
   • 1926, Hope Mirrlees, chapter 5, in Lud-in-the-Mist:

     The black rooks will fly away, my son, and you'll come back as brown as a berry, and as merry as a grig.

3. A small or young eel.
   • 1808–10, William Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, Folio Society 1995, p. 41:

     [W]e assembled at one o'clock, at two sat down to dinner, consisting of capital stewed grigs, a dish Mrs Burt was famous for dressing, a large joint of roast or boiled meat, with proper vegetables and a good-sized pudding or pie […] .

4. Specifically, the broad-nosed eel. See glut.

• merry as a grig

From Welsh grug, Cornish grig.

grig (plural grigs)

1. (UK, dialect) Heath or heather.
   • 1791, Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, Transactions of the Society of Arts, volume 9, page 80:

     The further method of tillage pursued, was to make fallows; and if the season permitted, so that the ground could be cleared and burnt off, to destroy the grig or heath, […]

grig (third-person singular simple present grigs, present participle grigging, simple past and past participle grigged)

1. (transitive) To irritate or annoy.

• Rigg

Cognate with English grig.

grig

1. To tantalize by showing without sharing a thing.

• Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828) William Barnes, editor, A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published 1867, page 43