dreadful vs grim

dreadful

adj
  • Genuinely horrific, awful, or alarming; dangerous, risky. 

  • Unpleasant, awful, very bad (also used as an intensifier). 

adv
  • Dreadfully. 

noun
  • A shocking or sensational crime. 

  • A journal or broadsheet printing such reports. 

  • A shocker: a report of a crime written in a provokingly lurid style. 

grim

adj
  • Ghastly or sinister. 

  • Rigid and unrelenting. 

  • Disgusting; gross. 

  • Dismal and gloomy, cold and forbidding. 

verb
  • To make grim; to give a stern or forbidding aspect to. 

How often have the words dreadful and grim occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )