Dill
nounA feathery aromatic herb whose leaves and seeds are used to flavour food, especially fish and pickles.
How to spell dill
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce dill
What does dill mean?
- nounA feathery aromatic herb whose leaves and seeds are used to flavour food, especially fish and pickles.
Dill in a sentence
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She sprinkled fresh dill over the poached salmon.
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The recipe for cucumber pickles calls for a sprig of dill.
Where does dill come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Dill comes from the Old English word dile, the native Anglo-Saxon name for this feathery aromatic herb. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives such as the Old High German tilli and the Dutch and German dille, all naming the same plant. The deeper origin of dile is uncertain and may have been a pre-Germanic word for the plant, so its ultimate root cannot be traced with confidence. The herb has been cultivated since ancient times for both cooking and folk medicine, and the name has stayed remarkably stable in form, shrinking only slightly from dile to the modern dill. Because it is a short native word with a doubled final consonant, the only real spelling point is remembering the two l letters.
How the word is built
- dill (from Old English dile, the herb; a single unanalysable root)
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