Fry

How to spell fry

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fry

What does fry mean?

1. verbTo cook food in hot fat or oil.
2. nounNewly hatched or very young fish.

Fry in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to fry the onions before adding the rice.

• noun

  The hatchery releases thousands of salmon fry into the river each spring.

• verb

  Heat the pan thoroughly before you fry the eggs.

• noun

  The pond was thick with tiny fry darting near the surface.

Where does fry come from?

Language of origin: French

The cooking sense of fry came into English in the early 1300s from the Old French verb frire, meaning 'to fry', which itself descended from the Latin frigere, 'to roast or fry'. The Latin root referred broadly to cooking food with dry heat or hot fat, and that practical sense carried straight through into English kitchens. The completely separate noun sense, meaning the tiny young of fish, has a different and older Germanic background and is probably related to Old Norse frjo, meaning 'seed' or 'offspring', which is why a swarm of newly hatched fish came to be called fry. These two unrelated histories happen to have collided on the same short spelling, so the word now does double duty for both the frying pan and the fish hatchery. The phrase 'small fry', for people or things of little importance, grew naturally out of the fish sense.

How the word is built

• fr- (root from Old French frire)
• -y