Gaze on, and grouell on thy face.It is said to be a back-formation from grovelling, which appears earlier in English. See also Scottish on grufe = face down, in a prone position, derived from Old Norse grúfa, in the phrase á grúfu.
S.C. Woodhouse, English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (1910; rpt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1950), pp. 375-376:
William Smith and Theophilus D. Hall, A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1870), p. 354, seems unsatisfactory:
For Latin equivalents I much prefer Karl Ernst Georges, Kleines lateinisch-deutsches und deutsch-lateinisches Handwörterbuch: Deutsch-lateinischer Teil, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Hahn, 1888), col. 885:
If the Oxford English Dictionary were an illustrated dictionary, what better illustration of grovelling than this photograph of Pope Francis taken last year?
