Gruesome means horrifying because of blood and injury. A gruesome discovery, gruesome details, gruesome injuries.
It is specifically about the physical rather than the emotional, which is why gruesome details is the standard phrase in reporting for what is being left out. Note grisly, which means the same thing and is constantly confused with grizzly, the bear; and that gruesome comes from an old verb grue, meaning to shudder, which is now entirely dead except inside this word.
1adjectivegruesomeHorrifying because of blood and injury.
“The film was so gruesome that I had to cover my eyes.”
synonyms: grisly, horrific
gruesome is a quality of horror.
The word is built from the obsolete verb grue, to shudder with fear, plus -some. Grue died out completely and left gruesome standing on nothing, which is why the word looks unanalysable.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰers-
English, today
gruesome
From grue + -some, probably popularized by the Scottish novelist and poet Walter Scott (1771–1832): see, for example, the 1816 quotation. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA