grewsome

grewsome (comparative more grewsome, superlative most grewsome)

1. Obsolete spelling of gruesome. [19th c.]
   • 1816, Jedadiah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter XII, in Tales of My Landlord, […], volume I (The Black Dwarf), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for William Blackwood, […]; London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 259:

     There's a wheen German horse doun at Glasgow yonder; they ca' their commander Wittybody, or some sic name, though he's as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e'er I saw.

   • 1857, [Thomas Hughes], “The Bird-Fanciers”, in Tom Brown’s School Days. […], Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, part II, page 303:

     [T]hey packed him [a dead duck] and sealed him up in brown paper, and put him in the cupboard of an unoccupied study, where he was found in the holidays by the matron, a grewsome body.

   • 1874 September, Bret Harte, “Wan Lee, the Pagan”, in Tales of the Argonauts, and Other Sketches, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company (late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.), published 1876, →OCLC, page 85:

     [T]he dim, mysterious half-light of the cellar falling in a grewsome way upon the misshapen bulk of a Chinese deity in the background, […]

   • 1889, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “The Battle of the Sand-belt”, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, New York, N.Y.: Charles L. Webster & Company, →OCLC, page 560:

     True, there were the usual night-sounds of the country—the whir of night-birds, the buzzing of insects, the barking of distant dogs, the mellow lowing of far-off kine—but these didn't seem to break the stillness, they only intensified it, and added a grewsome melancholy to it into the bargain.

   • 1895, Henry Seton Merriman, The Sowers‎^[1]:

     It was rather a grewsome scene.

   • 1900, Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie‎^[2]:

     His voice was hoarse and his unkempt head only added to its grewsome quality.

   • 1909, Cleveland Moffett, chapter 19, in Through the Wall‎^[3]:

     And various grewsome objects, a card case of human skin, and the twisted scarf used by a strangler.

   • 1912 October, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as “Jungle Battles”, in Tarzan of the Apes, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, June 1914, →OCLC, page 69:

     In the middle of the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and mouldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar grewsome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle nearby was a third, a wee mite of a skeleton.

   • 1918, Randall Parrish, Wolves of the Sea‎^[4]:

     I sprang back, giving utterance to a cry, which brought Watkins to me, and the two of us stared at the grewsome object and then about into the wavering shadows.