Grok () is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with", and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment".

According to the book, drinking water is a central focus on Mars, where it is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both grok each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized among the main characters, "thou art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term grok.

Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly, grok is generally pronounced as a guttural gr terminated by a sharp k with very little or no vowel sound (a narrow IPA transcription might be ).

William Tenn suggests that when creating the word, Heinlein might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept of griggo that was introduced in Tenn's 1949 story Venus and the Seven Sexes. In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible".

Definitions

Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of Stranger in a Strange Land, the word grok "was used first without any explicit definition on page 22" and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original).

The Jargon File, which describes itself as "The Hacker's Dictionary" and has been published under that name three times, puts grok in a programming context:

The entry existed in the very earliest forms of the Jargon File in the early 1980s.

The 2005 book Perl Best Practices defines grok as understanding a portion of computer code in a 'profound way'. It goes on to suggest that to re-grok code is to reload the intricacies of that portion of code into one's memory after some time has passed and all the details of it are no longer remembered. In that sense, to grok means to load everything into memory for immediate use. It is analogous to the way a processor caches memory for short term use, but the only implication by this reference was that it was something a human (or perhaps a Martian) would do.

Examples of computer culture use

A typical tech use from the Linux Bible characterizes the Unix software development philosophy as "one that can make your life a lot simpler once you grok the idea".

The 1994 book, Cyberia, covers its use in this subculture extensively:

  • The main web page for cURL, an open source tool and programming library, describes the function of cURL as "cURL groks URLs".
  • A reference book by Carey Bunks on the use of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is entitled Grokking the GIMP.
  • The generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI is named Grok.

Counterculture uses

  • Tom Wolfe, in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, describes a character's thoughts during an acid trip: "He looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time... he has never seen any of this flesh before, this stranger. He groks over that..."
  • In his counterculture Volkswagen repair manual, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat<!--not a typo--> Idiot (1969), dropout aerospace engineer John Muir instructs prospective used VW buyers to "grok the car" before buying.
  • The word was used numerous times by Robert Anton Wilson in his works The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. For instance, in The Eye in the Pyramid, volume one of Illuminatus:
  • And in The Trick Top Hat, volume two of Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy by Wilson:

See also

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  • Anschauung – related "sense-perception" concept in Kantian philosophy
  • Being-in-the-world – a term in the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger, aimed at deconstructing the subject–object distinction
  • Grokking (machine learning) – a transition to generalization that occurs many training iterations after the interpolation threshold, after many iterations of seemingly little progress
  • Introjection vs assimilation in Fritz and Laura Perls' gestalt therapy – analogous to memorizing vs grokking
  • Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description – a distinction in philosophy between familiarity with a person, place, or thing and knowledge of facts
  • Logos – a term in Western philosophy that has been used to describe various forms of knowledge and reasoning
  • Phenomenology (psychology) – the study of subjective experience

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References

  • SF citations for grok gathered for the Oxford English Dictionary by Jesse Sheidlower of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
  • WikiQuote on Stranger in a Strange Land includes many uses of grok