girn

verb

1. (dialectal)To grimace; to snarl.

   “At seventy-five or eighty I will be like a child myself, frail and cantankerous, a girning, burdensome old devil.”

2. (Northern-England, Scotland)To whinge, moan, complain.

   “And Jim was just girning all the time. I telled him to shut it.”

3. (intransitive)To make elaborate unnatural and distorted faces as a form of amusement or in a girning competition.

noun

1. A vocalization similar to a cat's purring.

   “A different vocalization, a girn, simiular to a cat's purring, was observed in infants reunited with their mothers...”