verb, ground or (Rare
) grind⋅ed; grind⋅ing; noun | 1. | to wear, smooth, or sharpen by abrasion or friction; whet: to grind a lens. |
| 2. | to reduce to fine particles, as by pounding or crushing; bray, triturate, or pulverize. |
| 3. | to oppress, torment, or crush: to grind the poor. |
| 4. | to rub harshly or gratingly; grate together; grit: to grind one's teeth. |
| 5. | to operate by turning a crank: to grind a hand organ. |
| 6. | to produce by crushing or abrasion: to grind flour. |
| 7. | Slang. to annoy; irritate; irk: It really grinds me when he's late. |
| 8. | to perform the operation of reducing to fine particles. |
| 9. | to rub harshly; grate. |
| 10. | to be or become ground. |
| 11. | to be polished or sharpened by friction. |
| 12. | Informal. to work or study laboriously (often fol. by away): He was grinding away at his algebra. |
| 13. | Slang. (in a dance) to rotate the hips in a suggestive manner. Compare bump (def. 11). |
| 14. | the act of grinding. |
| 15. | a grinding sound. |
| 16. | a grade of particle fineness into which a substance is ground: The coffee is available in various grinds for different coffee makers. |
| 17. | laborious, usually uninteresting work: Copying all the footnotes was a grind. |
| 18. | Informal. an excessively diligent student. |
| 19. | Slang. a dance movement in which the hips are rotated in a suggestive or erotic manner. Compare bump (def. 20). |
| 20. | grind out,
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grind
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"This Text holdeth their noses so hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their Faces." [Frith, "Mirror to know Thyself," 1532]The main modern (reflective) sense of "work hard" is from 1828.
GRIND
GRaphical INterpretive Display.
A graphics input language for the PDP-9.
["GRIND: A Language and Translator for Computer Graphics", A.P. Conn, Dartmouth, June 1969].
[The Jargon File]
(1995-01-31)
grind
1. (MIT and Berkeley) To prettify hardcopy of code, especially LISP code, by reindenting lines, printing keywords and comments in distinct fonts (if available), etc. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare; prettyprint was and is the generic term for such operations.
2. (Unix) To generate the formatted version of a document from the nroff, troff, TeX, or Scribe source.
3. To run seemingly interminably, especially (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to crunch or grovel. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc.
See also hog.
4. To make the whole system slow. "Troff really grinds a PDP-11."
5. "grind grind" excl. Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!"
[The Jargon File]
(1994-12-16)
Grind
(Ex. 32:20; Deut. 9:21; Judg. 16:21), to crush small (Heb. tahan); to oppress the poor (Isa. 3:5). The hand-mill was early used by the Hebrews (Num. 11:8). It consisted of two stones, the upper (Deut. 24:6; 2 Sam. 11:21) being movable and slightly concave, the lower being stationary. The grinders mentioned Eccl. 12:3 are the teeth. (See MILL.)
grind
In addition to the idiom beginning with grind, also see ax to grind; mills of the gods grind slowly.