grit / grits / hominy

Grit can refer to sand, ground grain, moral fortitude, or a Canadian political party. As a verb, it can refer to grinding or gnashing, especially of one’s teeth. The history of this rather small word takes us on a journey encompassing Beowulf, John Smith’s seventeenth-century travel narratives, Thomas Jefferson’s feud with John Adams, Canadian politics, P. T. Barnum’s showmanship, and, of course, the cuisine of the American South.

Grit comes to us from the Old English, greot meaning sand, gravel, dirt, or earth. We can see it used to mean sand in one of the riddles in the Exeter Book, which was copied in the late tenth century. The answer to the riddle is “ship”:

Siþum sellic    ic seah searo hweorfan,
grindan wið greote,    giellende faran.

(On occasions I saw a strange device make its way, grind against the grit, travel screeching.)

The Old English word could also be used a bit more generally to mean dirt or earth. Here we have a passage in Beowulf, about the dragon’s hoard being left buried as it was cursed:

Forleton eorla gestreon    eorðan healdan,
gold on greote,    þær hit nu gen lifað,
eldum swa unnyt    swa hyt [æro]r wæs.

(They left the earth holding the warriors’ treasure, gold in the grit, where it now resides, useless to men as it was before.)

The verb, meaning to make a grinding or grating noise, doesn’t appear until centuries later. Here is an early use from Oliver Goldsmith’s 1762 The Citizen of the World:

The muse found Scroggen stretch’d beneath a rug;
A window patch’d with paper, lent a ray,
That dimly shew’d the state in which he lay;
The sanded floor that grits beneath the tread,
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread.

And the verb is frequently used in the context of gritting one’s teeth. Here is Thomas Jefferson using it in this context in a journal entry:

December the 26th, 1797. Langdon tells me, that at the second election of President and Vice-President of the United States, when there was a considerable vote given to Clinton in opposition to Mr. Adams, he took occasion to remark it in conversation in the Senate chamber with Mr. Adams, who gritting his teeth, said, “damn ’em, damn ’em, damn ’em, you see that an elective government will not do.”

Gritting one’s teeth would eventually lead to grit meaning moral fortitude, a sense that is in place by 1825 when it appears in John Neal’s novel Brother Jonathan, the character of Brother Jonathan being a representation of the people of New England. Early uses of this sense are often in the phrase clear grit:

Old Bob, I mean; proper feller, he was, too; ’cute enough, I tell you! sharp's a razor—clear grit; one o’ them air half blooded Mohawks, ’od rot ’em!

A bit north of New England, clear grit became a nickname for a reformist political faction, one that would eventually merge with the Liberal Party. We see this nickname by the mid nineteenth century, for which the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP) has a citation from the 9 August 1849 issue of the Dundas Warder:

Though it is highly desirable to carry some of the objects of the “clear grits” into effect, the circumstances of their coquetting with the ULTRA TORY party is sufficient to excite suspicion, and to put real Reformers on their guard.

The next year the Boston Daily Atlas printed a letter of 15 February 1850 that reports on the Canadian political scene:

The Annexation Association, as you will perceive by the manifesto from which I sent you extracts in my last letter, will still continue the constitutional agitation of its cause, and it will be supported by the “clear grits.”

The clear grits soon became clipped and capitalized to Grits. Another example from the DCHP is from the United Empire Loyalist of 16 September 1852:

Will the Grits desert him in this; and allow him to be accused by the government “of leaving his slime upon everything that he crawled over?”

And one still sees Grits being used as a nickname for the Liberal Party. From the Toronto Star of 20 October 2015:

The list of neophyte Grit MPs also includes a former Quebec finance minister, a veteran diplomat, a former president of IBM Canada and an internationally trained lawyer with an Oxford MBA.

But the noun doesn’t just refer to sand, fortitude, or a Canadian political party. It can refer to ground grain. The first grain to be so named was oats, and we have oat grits and groats from at least 1584 when it appears in Thomas Cogan’s The Hauen of Health:

For of the greates or grotes as they call them, that is to say of Otes first dried and after lighlty shaled, being boyled in water with salt they make a kinde of meate which they call water potage.

Of course, today grits are most commonly associated with hominy, and we see hominy grits by the mid nineteenth century. Here is a use of the term in an account of General Tom Thumb, a.k.a. Charles Sherwood Stratton, a dwarf who performed for P. T. Barnum, visiting Queen Victoria and her family in 1847. Stratton would have been a child of nine at the time. The account was probably written by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who wrote in the voice of one Sam Slick:

Whereupon I clears my throat, as if I was goin to speak in Congress, and stretchin out my right hand—for an Honour Maid near me run for my cup and saucer—and said—“Get a pint of small Hominy grits; a pint of sifted Indian meal; a tea-spoonful of salt; three table-spoonfuls of fresh butter; three eggs; three table-spoonfuls of strong yeast; a quart of milk; a salt-spoonful of pearl-ash salaratus”—and there I stopt short.

Hominy is taken from the concluding morphemes in the Virginia Algonquian uskatahomen, meaning that which is ground by a pestle while uncooked. It appears in English in the writings of John Smith in 1630:

Their servants commonly feed upon Milke Homini, which is bruized Indian corne pounded, and boiled thicke, and milke for the sauce.

That’s quite a whirlwind tour of the varied history of a rather small word.

Sources:

Berkow, Jameson. “These Newly Elected Liberal MPs from the Business World Are Contenders for Cabinet.” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 April 2025. ProQuest.

“Canadian Correspondence of the Atlas” (15 February 1850). Boston Daily Atlas (Massachusetts), 25 February 1850, 1/7. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Cogan, Thomas. The Hauen of Health. London: Henrie Midleton for William Norton, 1584, 28–29. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, first edition, 1967, s.v. Grit, n., Clear Grit, n., Clear Grit Party, n.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. greot, n.

Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2008, lines 3166–68, 108.

“General Tom Thumb’s Visit to the Queen: Letter the Third.” The Albion (New York), 16 January 1847, 32/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Citizen of the World, vol. 1. Dublin: George and Alexander Ewing, 1762, 127. Archive.org.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1. Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed. Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904, 416–417. Archive.org.

Muir, Bernard J., ed. “Riddle 32.” The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, second edition, vol. 1 of 2. Exeter: Exeter UP, 2000, lines 3–4, 308. Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501.

Neal, John. Brother Jonathan, vol. 3 of 3. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1825, 386. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v., grit, n.1, grit, v., grit, n.2; third edition, March 2019, s.v., hominy, n., hominy grits, n.

Smith, John. True Travels. London: John Haviland for Thomas Slater, 1630, 43. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: sashafatcat, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.