Boil

How to spell boil

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce boil

What does boil mean?

1. verbTo heat a liquid until it bubbles and turns to vapour, or to cook food in such liquid.
2. nounA painful, inflamed swelling on the skin caused by infection of a hair follicle.

Boil in a sentence

• verb

  She waited for the kettle to boil before making the tea.

• noun

  The doctor lanced the boil on his neck and dressed the wound.

• verb

  The recipe says to boil the potatoes for twenty minutes.

• noun

  A warm compress can help bring a boil to a head.

Where does boil come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The cooking verb comes from the Latin bullire, meaning 'to bubble' or 'to seethe', which was itself built on bulla, a word for a bubble or rounded swelling. It travelled into English through the Old French boillir around the 1200s, first describing liquid heated until it bubbles and later widening to figurative anger ('boiling with rage'). The same Latin bulla, that little bubble or round object, also gave us 'bullet', 'bulletin' and even the 'bull' that means a papal document sealed with a round lead disc. Curiously, the other 'boil', the painful swelling on the skin, is a completely separate word: it descends from the Old English byle, of Germanic origin, and only came to be spelled the same way by coincidence. So although the two meanings look identical on the page, the cooking sense is Latin while the skin sense is native English, a quiet reminder of how spelling can fuse unrelated roots.

How the word is built

• From Latin bullire (to bubble), via Old French boillir; the modern spelling 'boil' represents the single syllable B-OY-L with no prefix or suffix