gripes


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gripe

 (grīp)
v. griped, grip·ing, gripes
v.intr.
1. Informal To complain naggingly or petulantly; grumble.
2. To have sharp pains in the bowels.
v.tr.
1. Informal To irritate; annoy: Her petty complaints really gripe me.
2. To cause sharp pain in the bowels of.
3. To grasp; seize.
4. To oppress or afflict.
n.
1. Informal A complaint.
2. gripes Sharp, spasmodic pains in the bowels.
3. A firm hold; a grasp.
4. A grip; a handle.

[Middle English gripen, to seize, from Old English grīpan.]

grip′er n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.gripes - acute abdominal pain (especially in infants)
lead colic, painter's colic - symptom of chronic lead poisoning and associated with obstinate constipation
hurting, pain - a symptom of some physical hurt or disorder; "the patient developed severe pain and distension"
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
References in classic literature ?
It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years after- wards.
Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw, In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head Wolf is Law.
As regarded novelties (among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its proper gripe and retentiveness.
The mean and low, yet strangely man-like expression of his wilted countenance; the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to gripe at every miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it betokened,--take this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the grossest form of the love of money.
At the threshold, they felt his pitiless gripe upon them.
The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust.
Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before I came into the world?"
He rushed towards her and seized her arm with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.
It represented strength, that body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and destroy.
He remembers nothing but his own inside--an' I wish it'ud gripe him."
In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.