A dialectal or archaic term referring to a swollen or distended condition, or possibly a type of skin eruption or glandular swelling.
Likely a compound of Germanic origin combining "grun" (possibly related to "green" or "grund"/ground) with "swel" (swell), though the exact etymology is uncertain and the term appears mainly in historical medical texts.
This word appears almost exclusively in 16th and 17th-century medical texts, where it might describe scrofula or other glandular diseases—it's a ghostword that shows how medical terminology was constantly invented and abandoned before modern standardization.
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