Grisly means causing horror through blood and death. Grisly details, a grisly discovery, grisly scenes.
It attaches to murder, accident and discovery, and it belongs to reporting more than to speech. Grisly details is the fixed phrase. Note the homophone trap with grizzly, which describes the bear and means grey-haired; and that the two are unrelated, though a grizzly bear is quite capable of being grisly.
1adjectivegrislyCausing horror through blood and death.
“The police made a grisly discovery in the woods: a body buried under leaves.”
grisly is a quality of horror.
Also accepted in games: gruesome
Old English grislic comes from grisan, to shudder with horror. Grim and gruesome are separate words, though all three do similar work.
Old English
grisliċ — grisly, horrible; dreadful, horrid
Middle English
grisely
English, today
grisly
Built from
From Middle English grisely, grysly, grissliȝ, griselich, grislich, from Old English grisliċ (“grisly, horrible; dreadful, horrid”), from grīsan (“to shudder with horror; to tremble, to be terrified; to make tremble, to terrify; to agrise, grise”) (unattested but implied in āgrīsan) + -lic. The word may also be an aphetic form of Old English ongrislic, agrisenliċ, the past participle of agrīsan (“to agrise”). Compare Danish grusom, Swedish gräslig, Middle Dutch grezelijc (modern Dutch griezelig), Middle High German grisenlich (modern German grässlich, grausen).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA