Definition of "grubby" []

• Dirty; grimy: grubby old work clothes. (adjective)
• Infested with grubs. (adjective)
• Contemptible; despicable: has a grubby way of treating others. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The phrase "British cinema documentary" came to mean a black and white collage of steam locomotives, slag heaps, women in grubby kitchens and men in flat caps, searchlights and bomb damage."
• "Are they scriveners churning out what the novelist Richard Yates himself a sometimes adman called "grubby little jobs for hire," or are they skilled poets performing on a commercial canvas?"
• "Thereupon he engages in what can only be described as a grubby piece of attempted blackmail of his party leader which was rightly rebuffed."