grif

• IPA^(key): /ɡɹɪf/
• Rhymes: -ɪf

grif (plural grifs)

1. (dated or historical) Alternative form of griffe (“person of mixed (black and white) race”).
   • 1807, François Raymond J. de Pons, Travels in South America, during ... 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804. Transl, page 249:

     His colour is nearly that of a grif or cobb, the produce of a mulatto and negro.

   • 1992, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century, LSU Press, →ISBN, page 263:

     […] in the inventory of the estate of Jean Decuir in 1771, she was listed as one of 3 mulatto children of a grif mother.

   • 2012, Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 82:

     Lisette also had two older daughters: Magdaleine, born in 1749; and Francoise, born in 1753 and variously identified as a grif or mulatto.

   • 2017, Terry Rey, The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 50:

     [This] author of one of the most detailed contemporary discussions about the prophetess and the Trou Coffy insurgency, was the first on record to refer to the prophetess as a “grif,” meaning someone born to one black and one mulatto parent.

• frig

grif m (plural grifs)

1. alternative form of griu

From Old Danish gryph, from Latin grȳphus, from Ancient Greek γρύψ (grúps). Doublet of grib and kerub.

Compare Old Norse gripr, Old Swedish griper, Swedish grip.

• IPA^(key): [ˈɡʁif]

grif c (singular definite griffen, plural indefinite griffer)

1. (mythology) a griffin

• griff

• ⇒ Norwegian Bokmål: griff

• “grif” in Den Danske Ordbog

Probably by contraction from an older form *gerif, in that form attested in East Frisian and in Gronings, cognate with Dutch gerief (“amenity”).

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪf
• IPA^(key): /ɣrɪf/

grif (comparative griffer, superlative grifst)

1. prompt, without hesitation, ready
2. eager

• (eager): gretig

• IPA^(key): (before 13^th CE) /ˈɡriːf/

Inherited from Old High German grifo, from Latin grȳps, from Ancient Greek γρύψ (grúps).

• grīfe

grīf m

1. (mythology) griffin, gryphon

   Alternative form: grīfe

• > German: Greif (inherited)
• → Old Polish: gryf
  • > Polish: gryf (inherited)
    • → Ukrainian: гриф (hryf)

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

grīf

1. second-person singular present imperative of grīfen

grīf

1. second-person singular present imperative of grīfan

Borrowed from German Griff.

grif m inan (Cyrillic spelling гриф)

1. (Kajkavian) grip
2. (Kajkavian) handle

• “grif”, in Rječnik hrvatskoga kajkavskoga književnog jezika [Dictionary of the Croatian Kajkavian literary language] (in Serbo-Croatian), https://kajkavski.hr, 1984–2026

Cognate with Dutch grif.

• IPA^(key): /ɡrɪf/

grif

1. certainly, without a doubt
2. probably
3. eagerly

“grif”, in Wurdboek fan de Fryske taal (in Dutch), 2011