grippe
Pluralgrippes
- 1Influenza, the contagious viral illness of the airways commonly known as the flu.
The grippe swept through the boarding house, leaving half the residents bedridden.
These other germs are the cause of colds and coughs and grippes.
1885, Public Health, MichiganNote
A borrowing that names the illness by what it does: French grippe, from gripper, "to seize", the same Germanic grasping root that gives English gripe. The word now sounds dated. Writers used it with the article or without: Eileen is "convalescent from grippe" in Robert W. Chambers's The Younger Set (1907). It could also be counted, as in the "colds and coughs and grippes" of Public Health, Michigan (1885).
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Origin
Borrowed from French grippe, from gripper ("to seize, snatch"), which traces back through Frankish and Proto-Germanic to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to grab, to grasp." From French it was borrowed into many languages around the world.