adj
Repellently frightful and shocking; ghastly, horrific.
He taks a ſvvirlie, auld moſs-oak, / For ſome black, grouſome Carlin; […]
There's a wheen German horse doun at Glasgow yonder; they ca' their commander Wittybody, or some sic name, though he's as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e'er I saw.
Awful, terrible.
The team was so unprepared that the way it played was just gruesome.
Of a person: filled with fear; afraid, fearful.
Then says I to myself,—"John Ridd, these trees, and pools, and lonesome rocks, and setting of the sunlight, are making a gruesome coward of thee. Shall I go back to my mother so, and be called her fearless boy?"
Some of his [Nathaniel Hawthorne's] companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes.