DictionaryAI

grateful

adjective
SayGRAYT-fuhl/ˈɡɹeɪtf(ə)l/UK/ˈɡɹeɪtf(ʊ)l/

2 meanings of grateful

Practice

  1. 1
    adjective
    Feeling or expressing gratitude or appreciation for a kindness or benefit received; thankful.

    We are deeply grateful to everyone who donated supplies after the flood.

    He wrote a grateful letter to the surgeons who saved his daughter's life.

    Similarthankful, appreciative, obliged, indebted

    Oppositeungrateful

    Note

    Thanks and pleasure share one root here. The base is an obsolete adjective grate, which meant both 'pleasing' and 'thankful', borrowed from Latin grātus, 'agreeable, pleasing; beloved, dear'. That double meaning is why the word still carries both senses. Its opposites are ungrateful and ingrateful. Comparison usually runs more grateful, most grateful, though gratefuller and gratefullest exist too.

  2. 2
    adjectivearchaic
    Of a thing, pleasing to the mind or senses; agreeable or welcome.

    The grateful shade of the old oak offered relief from the noon heat.

    Fell I upon my spear, / O, death was grateful!
    1842, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “[Ballads.] The Skeleton in Armour.”

    Oppositeungrateful

    Note

    Here the pleasure runs the other way: a grateful thing gives satisfaction rather than feeling it. The sense is archaic, and applying it to a person is obsolete. Elijah Fenton's 1725 Odyssey has a seer basking 'in grateful sleep', and The Taming of the Shrew calls a gift 'very grateful'. Read such lines as 'welcome'. In plain modern prose, the word will be taken for the thankful meaning.

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Origin

Formed from the now-obsolete adjective 'grate' (meaning agreeable, pleasing, or thankful) plus the suffix '-ful'. 'Grate' was borrowed from Latin 'grātus' (agreeable, pleasing, beloved, thankful), which ultimately goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *gʷerH- (to express approval or praise).