Groom

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /ɡɹuːm/

Definitions

1. A person employed to take care of horses, or a man about to be married
2. Someone who looks after and tends to horses ; a male who is engaged to be married ; to clean or tidy an animal or person carefully
3. An individual responsible for the maintenance and care of horses ; a man who is soon to wed ; to brush or make neat physical appearance

Etymology: Most people meet "groom" first as the man at a wedding, but the stable sense is the older one in English. The word that became "bridegroom" was "brydguma" in Old English, built from "brȳd" (bride) and "guma" (man, hero), so the sense of "man" was there from the start. Over the Middle English period the second half was reshaped, probably under the influence of "grom" or "grome," a word for a boy or attendant. That is how "bridegroom" shortened to "groom" in 1604, when it first appeared as a standalone term for a husband-to-be. The horse sense comes from the attendant word. "Grom" and "grome" in Middle English meant a boy or youth, and by the late Middle Ages a "groom" could be a man servant, a stable boy who tended horses. The origin of "grom" itself is uncertain. Related forms in Dutch, Old Icelandic and Old French all meant a boy or manservant, and one suggestion links them to a Germanic root for "swollen belly" or "fish guts," but that link is not settled.

Synonyms: caretaker, attendant, bridegroom, groomer, squire