Dice

How to spell dice

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dice

What does dice mean?

1. nounA small cube marked with one to six spots on its faces, thrown to produce a random number in games.
2. verbTo cut food into small, even cubes.

Dice in a sentence

• noun

  He rolled the dice and moved his counter six squares.

• verb

  The recipe asked her to dice the onion before frying it.

• noun

  A pair of dice sat on the green felt of the casino table.

• verb

  Please dice the carrots into neat little squares for the stew.

Where does dice come from?

Language of origin: French

Dice is the plural of the older English noun 'die', a small numbered cube, and it came into English in the 1300s from the Old French word 'des', which was itself the plural of 'de'. That French word traces back to the Latin 'datum', meaning literally 'something given' or 'a thing played', from the verb 'dare', 'to give'. The sense narrowed over time from a generic 'thing thrown or played in a game' to the specific marked cube used for gambling and board games. By the late medieval period 'dice' had become so common that many speakers stopped feeling it as a plural at all, which is why people happily say 'a dice' today. The cooking sense, to chop food into small cubes, grew naturally from the resemblance of the neat little pieces to gaming cubes, and that visual link is a handy way to remember the single -c- spelling.

How the word is built

• dice (plural of die, from Old French des) used as both noun and verb