grips

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of grip.

   He tightened the grips on his hiking poles before the long descent.

   Several grips moved the lighting equipment between shots on set.

   Note

   The plural belongs only to the countable uses of grip: several handholds, the handles of tools or poles, the clamping parts of a machine, the devices a cable car uses to clutch its traction cable. The sense of traction stays uncountable, so a tire has good grip, not good grips. Used with the plural, the word points to handles or holds instead.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of grip.

   A good winter tire grips the road even on packed snow.

   He grips the steering wheel hard whenever the traffic gets heavy.

   Note

   The verb shares its spelling with the plural noun, and a singular subject is what tells them apart. With a person as subject it can take an object or stand alone (she grips the rail). When the subject is an emotion, a situation or a story, the object is the person affected. A dialectal verb meaning "to trench or drain" has the same form.

   Panic grips the crowd as the lights go out.

   The novel grips its readers from the first page.

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