Grippe is an old-fashioned word for the flu, the contagious illness that causes fever, body aches, coughing, and exhaustion. You might see it in older books or historical documents. For example, when Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about frontier life, she mentioned people getting the grippe during harsh winters. The word comes from French and was commonly used in English through the early 1900s.

Today, people almost always say “flu” or “influenza” instead of grippe, but you'll still encounter the word when reading classic literature or historical accounts.

If your grandmother mentions that someone “had the grippe,” she means they had the flu. The symptoms are the same, just described with an older term. It's like how people once said “icebox” for what we now call a refrigerator: the thing itself hasn't changed, but the word we use for it has.