GRUB STREET • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Grub Street

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/grəb strit/ Listen

noun

Grub n.

(Zool.) The larva of an insect, especially of a beetle; called also grubworm. See Illust. of Goldsmith beetle, under Goldsmith. "Yet your butterfly was a grub."

A short, thick man; a dwarf. (Obs.)

Victuals; food. (Slang)

Grub ax or Grub axe, a kind of mattock used in grubbing up roots, etc.

Grub breaker. Same as Grub hook (below).

Grub hoe, a heavy hoe for grubbing.

Grub hook, a plowlike implement for uprooting stumps, breaking roots, etc.

Grub saw, a handsaw used for sawing marble.

Grub Street, a street in London (now called Milton Street), described by Dr. Johnson as "much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet." As an adjective, suitable to, or resembling the production of, Grub Street. "I 'd sooner ballads write, and grubstreet lays."

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Etymology of 'Grub Street'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Grub street" Quotes from Famous Books

... have had still better cause for complaint, had he been aware that the Yiddish of the Russo-Polish Jews, despite its considerable Slavonic admixture, was purer German than that of his contemporaries in Germany, even as the English of our New England colonies was superior to the Grub Street style prevalent in Dr. Johnson's England, and the Spanish of our Mexican annexations to the Castilian spoken at the time of Coronado. But we are here concerned with their knowledge of foreign languages. We shall refer only to the Hebrew-German-Italian-Latin-French dictionary ...

— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... to be entertained in the allegorical Grub Street of the great American writer. Or a search-warrant to be sent thither to catch a poet. On the former supposition, he shall be discovered under some most unlikely form, or shall be supposed to ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... Milton Street (as it is now called), through which we walked for a very excellent reason; for this is the veritable Grub Street, where my literary kindred of former times used to congregate. It is still a shabby-looking street, with old-fashioned houses, and inhabited chiefly by people of the poorer classes, though not by authors. Next we went to Old Broad Street, and, being joined by Mr. B———, we ...

— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... insolvent debtor—to obtain liquidation from the Southern planter—was really the soulless and mercenary object of the craven Northerners. Let the common people of England look to this. Let the improvident literary hack, the starved impecunious Grub Street debtor, the newspaper frequenter of sponging- houses, remember this in their criticisms of the vile and ...

— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... years older than Macaulay, and who was to live and write for twenty-five years after Macaulay's passing, had not yet struck twelve. London, too, like Edinburgh, was full of writing men, standing in the market-places of Grub Street with no man ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

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