Did you know?
Gritty comes from grit ("small hard granules"), which in turn derives, via Middle English, from an Old English word for "sand" or "gravel." Grit has been around since before the 12th century, but the first appearance of gritty in print in English was near the end of the 16th century, when it was used in the sense of "resembling or containing small hard granules." Grit entered American slang with the meaning "courage or persistence" in the early 19th century, and gritty followed suit with a corresponding "plucky" sense. By the 19th century's end, gritty was also being used to describe a literary style that was rough and coarse.
Examples of gritty in a Sentence
Los Angeles Times, 9 Feb. 2026
In a move that signals the next phase of the artificial intelligence boom, Emanate, an AI startup focused on the gritty reality of America’s industrial supply chain, has emerged from stealth.
—Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 9 Feb. 2026
Her speciality is finding regular people out in the wild, for projects that aim for gritty realism — American Honey, Euphoria, and the Safdie brothers’ films Good Time and Uncut Gems, which led her to casting Josh Sadfie’s Marty Supreme.
—Nate Jones, Vulture, 6 Feb. 2026
Season 4 focuses on the search for a missing Navajo girl, which takes Leaphorn, Chee and Manuelito from the safety of Navajo Nation to the gritty terrain of 1970s Los Angeles in a race against the clock to save her from an obsessive killer with ties to organized crime.
—Katie Campione, Deadline, 5 Feb. 2026
See All Example Sentences for gritty
Cite this Entry
“Gritty.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gritty. Accessed 14 Feb. 2026.
Copy Citation
