Grim vs Macabre - What's the difference?
grim | macabre | Synonyms |
dismal and gloomy, cold and forbidding
rigid and unrelenting
ghastly or sinister
* 2012 March 22, Scott Tobias, “
(UK, slang) disgusting; gross
Representing or personifying death.
* 1941 , George C. Booth, Mexico's School-made Society , page 106
Obsessed with death or the gruesome.
* 1993 , Theodore Ziolkowski, "Wagner's Parsifal'' between Mystery and Mummery", ''in'' Werner Sollors (ed.), ''The Return of Thematic Criticism , pages 274-275
Ghastly, shocking, terrifying.
* 1927 [1938], , Introduction
Macabre is a synonym of grim.
As adjectives the difference between grim and macabre
is that grim is dismal and gloomy, cold and forbidding while macabre is representing or personifying death.As a proper noun Grim
is {{surname|A=An|English}}, probably derived from Old English grimm or Old Norse grimr or grimmr.grim
English
Adjective
(grimmer)- Life was grim in many northern industrial towns.
- His grim determination enabled him to win.
- A grim castle overshadowed the village.
The Hunger Games''”, in ''AV Club :
- In movie terms, it suggests Paul Verhoeven in Robocop/Starship Troopers mode, an R-rated bloodbath where the grim spectacle of children murdering each other on television is bread-and-circuses for the age of reality TV, enforced by a totalitarian regime to keep the masses at bay.
- Wanna see the dead rat I found in my fridge? —Mate, that is grim !
macabre
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- There are four fundamental figures. One is a man measuring and comparing his world In front of him is a macabre figure, a cadaver ready to be dissected. This symbolizes man serving mankind. The third figure is the scientist, the man who makes use of the information gathered in the first two fields of mensurable science.
- Indeed, in the 1854 draft of Tristan he planned to have Parzival visit the dying knight, and both operas display the same macabre obsession with bloody gore and festering wounds.
- The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life.