Heard a radio DJ use this today as a sort of catch-phrase to his morning show. To make it a point to go through the day with good cheer and look for ways to compliment people, etc. Never considered that disgruntled, commonly used, had gruntle as the opposite root. And, actually, I don't think I've ever heard gruntled used on its own in my lifetime...till now. But it's a definite word:

from Merriam-Websters:

grun-tle: to put in good humor <were gruntled with a good meal and a good conversation -- W.P. Webb>

What sayest the OED about gruntled?

What thinkest my fellow wordies?

Be gruntled! I kinda like it.

I kinda like it.

Me too, WO'N! And it has all sorts of wonderfully contrary associations doesn't it? Nice word!

This is a truly funny word, W'! I will make a point of using it in some writing exercises this year to see how it is understood.

What sa[ith] the OED about gruntled?

The most applicable definition for gruntle is: To grumble, murmur, complain

The definition given by M-W for gruntle is a modern back-formation from disgruntle assuming the more common negating meaning of dis-. The dis- in disgruntle would be the intensive rather than the negating dis-.

Gruntle is grunt plus the frequentative ending -le

See also

http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=weeklythemes&Number=107926

>modern back-formation

how modern, you ask? MW says 1926. OED may catch up with this via their ongoing revisions around 2015 (inexplicably, they started in the middle of the alphabet :).

the only online source which comes close to the complete story is this: <g>
http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/ghi.htm#gruntle

re inexplicably they started in the middle of the alphabet
Have some ruth, that's probably a major rebellion for a dictionary writer- very exciting stuff.
Shame about gruntled though, I liked it too.

Doesn't PG Wodehouse describe someone as being "if not exactly disgruntled was very far from being gruntled"?

I forget which book it was, but no doubt somebody out there knows.

Bingley

http://www.quinion.com/words/articles/unpaired.htm

(Code of the Woosters was published in 1938, so this isn't the source of the 1926 date given for the back-formation of gruntle)

[as an interesting coincidence (or not), see the sidebar on this page: http://www.wodehouse.org/PlumLines/patzel.html]

Something from tsuwm's Quinion link I found extra-interesting:


>Similarly, dishevelled comes from the Old French deschevelé and was not derived from a word shevelled. That word was created from it later by losing its first syllable through a process called aphesis and had the same sense. However, it was never common and has long since vanished from the lexicon.<

The early literal sense of dismantle was to remove one’s cloak or mantle, and hence to undress; it was later applied figuratively to the process of stripping a fortress of its defences; all these meanings existed in French before the word came into English. Here, mantle has not vanished, though it is rarer than its opposite.