1871 L. H. Bagg Four Years at Yale 45 Grad, abbreviation for graduate.

1893 W. K. Post Harvard Stories p. ix Reverend grads., from the tales I have heard ye tell, I opine that the undergraduate is still the same.

1920 F. S. Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise i. iv. 149 Amory ‘ran it out’ at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange theories.

1950 M. Marples University Slang 184 The provincial universities..have even produced analogous abbreviations [to undergrad], such as grad = graduate (Durham, 1934 +) and post-grad = post-graduate (Leeds, 1940).

1957 W. H. Whyte Organization Man xxi. 269 Only 27·3 per cent of high school grads aged twenty-five to thirty-four..were inter~state migrants.

1958 Times 3 Nov. 6/1 Town and gown in Cambridge have..been inclined to settle their differences through fists..and once again conflict is causing some concern, this time under the heading of ‘grads’ versus ‘teds’.

1969 Daily Tel. 10 Mar. 1/4 Cambridge police were last night looking for three youths who beat up Rajeer Dhavan, 22, undergraduate son of the Indian High Commissioner, in the latest episode of ‘grad~bashing’.

1909 in Webster's New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang.

1953 Amer. Jrnl. Physics 21 294 Proposed symbols for physical units... Grad (≡10⁻² rt. angle).

1959 G. James & R. C. James Math. Dict. (ed. 2) 176/2 Grad, one-hundredth part of a right-angle in the centesimal system of measuring angles, also called a grade or degree.

1909 J. G. Coffin Vector Anal. v. 102 The vector..is called the gradient or the slope of V..and is written grad V or slope V.

1909 J. G. Coffin Vector Anal. v. 103 It remains to show that the operator ∇ applied to V gives the grad.

1957 R. S. Longhurst Geom. & Physical Optics xix. 393 If ϕ is a scalar point function, grad ϕ is a vector.

1962 T. M. Apostol Calculus II. iv. 170 The notation grad f is also used instead of ∇f.