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say it: GRA-sping
grasping is a noun and adjective meaning "understanding with difficulty". It carries 3 recorded senses.
understanding with difficulty
“the lecture was beyond his most strenuous graspings”
the act of gripping something firmly with the hands (or the tentacles)
immoderately desirous of acquiring e.g. wealth
“they are avaricious and will do anything for money”
“casting covetous eyes on his neighbor's fields”
“a grasping old miser”
“grasping commercialism”
“greedy for money and power”
“grew richer and greedier”
“prehensile employers stingy with raises for their employees”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for grasping come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.