Keen, piercing distress in the wake of loss.
Keen, piercing distress in the wake of loss — at its core the raw sorrow of bereavement.
The acute, bereavement-centered member: poignant sorrow for an immediate cause. Two cues set it apart — immediacy (the keen, present-tense pang, where sorrow is broader and quieter) and cause (prototypically death/loss). The crucial pairing is with mourning: grief is the inward felt emotion, mourning its outward expression and customs. Anguish is grief intensified to agony. Note the lighter colloquial sense “trouble” (“good grief,” “give someone grief”), separate from the emotional core.
Literal root is “heaviness.” Early 13c. “hardship, suffering,” from Old French grief, from Latin gravare “make heavy; cause grief,” from gravis “weighty,” from PIE *gwere- “heavy” (the root of gravity, grave). The “mental pain, sorrow” sense is from c. 1300.
A clear shift from physical “heaviness, hardship, burden” to internal “sorrow” by c. 1300. “Good grief” dates to 1912; the colloquial “trouble/annoyance” senses are later and informal. No reliable recent-generation reversal of the core meaning.