Grim means dark and serious with no comfort in it. Picture a face at a funeral, or a doctor walking towards you a little too slowly.
Two things get called grim: people and situations. A grim expression, grim determination, a grim silence at the table — that is the face. Grim news, grim statistics, a grim little flat with one window onto a wall — that is the situation, and it means genuinely bad, not merely gloomy. In Britain grim is also a low, everyday complaint: the weather was grim, the coffee here is grim. The adverb grimly does a lot of work in novels — he smiled grimly is a smile with nothing happy in it — and Death with his scythe is the Grim Reaper.
1adjectivegrimSerious and unsmiling.
“His face was grim as he read the letter a second time.”
2adjectivebleakVery bad, worrying or depressing.
“The report makes grim reading for the whole industry.”
3adjectiveawfulUnpleasant or poor in quality.
“The food in the canteen was grim.”
synonyms: awful, dreadful
Grim runs back through Old English grimm and Proto-Germanic grimmaz to a Proto-Indo-European root gʰrem-, meaning to resound, thunder, grumble or roar. The oldest thing in the word is a noise — the growl before the trouble starts. What English kept is the face that goes with the growl.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰrem- — to resound, thunder, grumble, roar
Proto-Germanic
*grimmaz
Proto-West Germanic
*grimm
Old English
grimm
Middle English
grim
English, today
grim
From Middle English grim, from Old English grimm, from Proto-West Germanic grimm, from Proto-Germanic grimmaz, from Proto-Indo-European gʰrem- (“to resound, thunder, grumble, roar”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA