Dish
nounA shallow container used for serving or cooking food, or the prepared food itself.
How to spell dish
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce dish
What does dish mean?
- nounA shallow container used for serving or cooking food, or the prepared food itself.
- verbTo serve out food, or more loosely to hand out something freely.
Dish in a sentence
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noun
She placed the casserole dish in the centre of the table.
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verb
The volunteers began to dish the hot soup to everyone in the queue.
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noun
His signature dish is a slow-cooked lamb curry.
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verb
Critics were quick to dish harsh judgement on the new restaurant.
Where does dish come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word comes from the Old English disc, meaning a plate or a bowl, which the Anglo-Saxons had themselves borrowed from the Latin discus. In Latin discus meant a flat circular object such as a quoit or a serving platter, and that in turn came from the Greek diskos, the round disc thrown in athletic contests. The same Latin discus is the surprising common ancestor of a whole cluster of English words: 'disc', 'disk', 'desk', and even 'dais' all branch from it, each keeping a sense of flatness or roundness. Over the centuries the meaning of dish broadened from the physical container to the food served in it, so that a 'dish' can now be a recipe or course as easily as a piece of crockery. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, since the original Latin 'sc' softened into the simple English 'sh' sound long ago.
How the word is built
- dish (from Old English disc: plate, bowl), a single unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix
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