Nitty-gritty
adj, noun, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The core or essence of something; the gist. also, attributive, colloquial, uncountable
"He gave a short summary without getting into the nitty-gritty of the problem."
- 2 the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience wordnet
- 1 Dealing with something in great depth. colloquial
"1976, United States. National Commission on Arthritis and Related Musculoskeletal Diseases, Arthritis - Out of the Maze We deal with them at a very, very nitty gritty level, and we deal with the results of years and years of problems that they've had in the past."
Example
More examples"Let's get down to the nitty-gritty."
Etymology
Of uncertain origin; said to have been first used by black jazz musicians from the United States, the word is perhaps a reduplication of gritty (“resembling grit”) (ultimately from Proto-Germanic *greutą (“grit”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrewd-) with alteration of the first syllable. An urban legend links the origin of the word to the debris remaining in the holds of slave ships after the slaves had been disembarked, but there is no evidence for this. The word is not attested early enough to have been associated with slavery.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.