These two words have very different meanings. 
Often ‘grizzly’ is used when ‘grisly’ would be correct.
- Grisly: gruesome, causing horror or disgust – ‘a grisly murder was discovered’.
- Grizzly: grey or grey-haired. It can also be used to refer to a whining or crying child (from to grizzle) in British English. But you will probably see the word used most commonly to refer to a kind of bear – the grizzly bear.
Hannah McCall 
[…] Grisly and grizzly […]
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Don’t forget ‘gristly’ (meat full of gristle); easily confused with grisly, especially when you consider the subject matter of most horror and thriller books.
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Yes, it certainly is! Thank you.
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Hi, thanks for visiting and liking my blog. These posts are really interesting – I like to make sure I’m using words correctly all the time and do frequently resort to the dictionary ! Can I suggest complimentary vs complementary as a future post – those are two words I always get confused!
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You’re welcome 🙂 and thanks. Of course, I’d love suggestions! I have had those mentioned before so they are very good candidates for an upcoming post and you shouldn’t feel alone in confusing them.
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Well Hannah, you’ve obviously read my blog and know that my work there could very well keep you employed forever! :O)
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I was just interested in the content – honest! Although my rates are very reasonable 😉
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Thank you, Hannah. And I will keep that in mind. :O)
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Ran into a funny one today online: jester and gesture. I’ve actually never seen these two confused until now. Ain’t the interwebs special? =)
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Haha – I haven’t seen that mix up before either! Thank you for sharing. I did have to sit here for a while repeating each word out loud to confirm to myself the slight difference in pronunciation …
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Agreed. I would even say, the difference in pronounciation is pronounced 🙂 This is what Merriam Webster has to say on that:
jest·er \ˈjes-tər\ versus ges·ture \ˈjes-chər, ˈjesh-\
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Thank you, this was my conclusion. I do wonder if the difference is not so obvious when spoken in some accents (or at a fast pace), and that accounts for the confusion. I did have a poke around on Google and it seems that there are blog posts and articles dedicated to ‘jester’ vs ‘gesture’ – but no real indication of why. Unfortunately it has been a very long time since I studied this area of linguistics!
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For those who live near the mountains, I doubt that they’ll have confusion with these two words. I never knew that these two words would become an issue so this was an interesting post.
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They are homophones so that is likely why they get muddled easily.
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