Loading page
say it: gruhf
gruff is an adjective meaning "brusque and surly and forbidding". It carries 2 recorded senses.
brusque and surly and forbidding
“crusty remarks”
“a crusty old man”
“his curmudgeonly temper”
“gruff manner”
“a gruff reply”
deep and harsh sounding as if from shouting or illness or emotion
“gruff voices”
“the dog's gruff barking”
“hoarse cries”
“makes all the instruments sound powerful but husky”
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 gruff 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.