Gruff means rough and abrupt in voice or manner. Short answers in a low, scraping voice.
The word describes sound and character at once, and it is usually applied to men, particularly older ones. Crucially, it is not the same as unkind: the gruff exterior hiding a soft heart is one of the most reliable characters in fiction, and the word carries that possibility with it. A gruff voice is low and hoarse, and a gruff manner is unpolished rather than hostile. The adverb is gruffly, and it lives in dialogue tags.
1adjectivegruffRough, low and abrupt in voice or manner.
“He gave a gruff nod and went back inside.”
Gruff arrived from Dutch in the sixteenth century, where grof meant rough, coarse or rude. English kept the roughness and narrowed it onto the voice.
Proto-Germanic
*grubaz — coarse, rough
Proto-West Germanic
*grob
Old Saxon
*grof
Old Dutch
*grof
Middle Low German
grof
Dutch
grof
English, today
gruff
Built from
16th century, from Dutch grof and/or Middle Low German grof (both “rough, coarse, rude”), from Old Dutch grof or Old Saxon grof, both from Proto-West Germanic grob, from Proto-Germanic grubaz (“coarse, rough”), possibly from an earlier gahrubaz and then related with hreubaz (“scabby, rough, scrubby”). Cognate with stq groaf (“rough, coarse, crude”), West Frisian grof (“rough, coarse, crude”), Low German groff (“rough, coarse, crude”), German grob (“rough, coarse, crude”), Swedish grov (“rough, coarse, crude”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA