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Oct 24, 2014
This week's theme
Words formed by metathesis (a transposition of sounds)

This week's words
mullion
sprattle
brummagem
pernancy
girn

This week's comments
AWADmail 643

Next week's theme
Rhetorical devices
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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

girn

PRONUNCIATION:
(gurn)

MEANING:
verb intr.: To snarl, grimace, or complain.
noun: A grimace or snarl.

ETYMOLOGY:
By transposition of the word grin, from Old English grennian (to show teeth). Earliest documented use: 1440.

USAGE:
"At seventy-five or eighty I will be like a child myself, frail and cantankerous, a girning, burdensome old devil."
Jessica Stirling; The Wind from the Hills; St Martin's Press; 1999.

See more usage examples of girn in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none. -William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)

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