Obscure Word of the Day ...

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Grutched - In a seventeenth-century letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke:

“I have long grutched the time spent ...”.

Grutched has a wonderful sound to it and that it should be more commonly used. In Newton’s time it was still employed in the sense of being reluctant to give or allow something, to begrudge, but it seems to have gone out of mainstream English currency around 1700.

It lasted long enough in a few local dialects for it to be included in the English Dialect Dictionary at the very end of the nineteenth century and to be resurrected, temporarily, by Rudyard Kipling in his Barrack-Room Ballads (“I paid my price for findin’ out, / Nor never grutched the price I paid”). Its origin is the Old French word groucier, to murmur or grumble. Our modern grudge is an altered form of it.

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