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grease

noun · verb

Simple meaning

Animal fat in a melted or soft state.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

grees
US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈɡɹis

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. Animal fat in a melted or soft state.

  2. by extension

    Any oily or fatty matter.

  3. Inflammation of a horse's heels, also known as scratches or pastern dermatitis.

  4. Shorn but not yet cleansed wool.

verb

  1. To depart or slip away.

  2. transitiveinformal

    To bribe.

  3. transitiveinformal

    To cause to go easily; to facilitate.

  4. transitiveslang

    To extinguish the life of.

  5. transitive

    To put grease or fat on something, especially in order to lubricate.

  6. To affect (a horse) with grease, the disease.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
Frequency
Moderately Common
Formality
Technical

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: Animal fat in a melted or soft state.

Used this way, grease is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Matter-of-fact
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

More ways to use grease

  • “Be careful not to get grease on your nice clothes when you are working on the car.”noun

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

elbow greasegrease pencilaxle greasegrease spotgrease gunbacon greasehot greasegrease paint

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Inflected forms

Grammatical variations of the same word.

  • greasedadjectiveInflected form

    Smeared with oil or grease to reduce friction.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • grease one's palmsverbCompound term

    Make illegal payments to in exchange for favors or influence.

  • grease monkeynounCompound term

    Someone whose occupation is repairing and maintaining automobiles.

  • grease gunnounCompound term

    A hand-operated pump that resembles a pistol.

  • hair greasenounCompound term

    A toiletry for the hair.

  • axle greasenounCompound term

    A thick heavy grease used to lubricate axles.

  • wool greasenounCompound term

    A yellow viscous animal oil extracted from wool.

Related words

Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.

Related Words

Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.