Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

grout

UK/ɡɹaʊt/US/ɡɹaʊt/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,447 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: grouts

Grout is the paste pressed between tiles to fill the joints. Apply the grout, clean the grout, mouldy grout.

It seals the gaps and stops water getting behind the tiles, and it is the part that fails first — grout goes mouldy and cracks long before any tile does. Silicone is used where two surfaces meet at an angle, because grout there will crack.

own · Public domain

Definitions of grout

  1. 1noungroutThe paste pressed between tiles to fill the joints.C1

    “Wipe off the extra grout before it dries on the face of the tiles.”

grout is a filler.

Where it comes from

Old English grut meant coarse meal or dregs, from a Germanic root. Groats are a relative.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *gʰer-

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *grūtą

  3. Proto-West Germanic

    *grūt

  4. Old English

    grūt — dregs; coarse meal

  5. Middle English

    growte

  6. English, today

    grout

From Middle English growte, grut, from Old English grūt (“dregs; coarse meal”), from Proto-West Germanic grūt, from Proto-Germanic grūtą (compare Dutch gruit (“dregs”), German Grauß, Norwegian grut (“ground”)), lengthening of Proto-Germanic grutą, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European gʰer- (“to grind, rub”). Related to grit.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Tools & DIY

Practise this word

grout in the wild

  • Common uses for grout in the household include filling in tiles of shower floors and kitchen tiles.

    Grout

  • Unlike other structural pastes such as plaster or joint compound, correctly mixed and applied grout forms a water-resistant seal.

    Grout

  • Both a line pump and a grout pump is either mounted on a truck or placed on a trailer.

    Concrete pump

  • Line pumps can handle aggregate of 3/4" diameter while grout pumps are designed only for 3/8" or pea gravel size rock.

    Concrete pump

  • A grout curtain is a barrier that protects the foundation of a dam from seepage and can be made during initial construction or during repair.

    Grout curtain

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.