The word entered English by the fourteenth century, from Old French. Its earliest recorded sense described writing something out in large, formal letters, a style reserved for official legal documents. Samuel Pepys, in his diary, described the story of England's Archbishops of Canterbury written this way, upon vellum.
Old French built the word twice, from the same root. A second formation came from a phrase meaning in bulk, or wholesale. Jonathan Swift, the satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels, used it in 1728, in An Answer to a Memorial, warning that graziers were always ready to seize vast quantities of land for themselves.
A third formation drew on the same root, this time meaning to make something physically thick or heavy. Behind all three formations lies a single adjective, meaning thick, its own deeper origin still disputed with no PIE root documented.
GROCERY and GROSSLY share the same root as this word. GROCERY entered English in the early fifteenth century, naming Grocers' Hall, the London livery hall of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, one of the city's ancient trade guilds and a meeting place for wholesale merchants. GROSSLY entered English in the 1520s, first meaning plainly, or obviously, before narrowing to meaning coarse, and later, excessive.
By the seventeenth century the word had drifted toward the mind rather than the market, describing anything that could draw a person's full attention. In 1709 Richard Steele, co-founder of the influential periodical The Tatler, used the word when writing of a character named Orlando who believed himself free from being consumed by any single passion. William Cowper, one of the most popular English poets of his day, complained in a 1781 letter that his own mornings were entirely taken up in this way, by nothing more than his garden.
