disgruntled [M17th] Disgruntled people may go round muttering to themselves and complaining. Originally the word involved comparison with a pig making small or subdued grunts (an Old English word probably imitating the sound). The main element of disgruntled is gruntle, a dialect word used of pigs from the Middle Ages and of grumbling people from a little later. In the 17th century someone added dis- as an intensifier and created disgruntled. In the 20th century the comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) removed the dis- again and introduced the humorous gruntled, ‘pleased’. In The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938, he wrote: ‘I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.’