Grail

How to spell grail

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grail

What does grail mean?

1. nounAn object or achievement that is eagerly pursued and very hard to attain.

Grail in a sentence

• A cheap, reliable battery is the engineering grail that every carmaker chases.

• For collectors, that first edition is the grail of the entire series.

Where does grail come from?

Language of origin: French

Grail comes into English from the Old French graal or greal, the name for a wide dish or serving vessel used in medieval romances about King Arthur and his knights. Those French forms trace back to the Medieval Latin gradalis, which seems to have meant a flat dish or platter brought to the table in stages during a meal, possibly linked to gradus, meaning a step or degree. The exact path is genuinely murky, and scholars have offered several competing explanations for the root. In the romances the vessel became the Holy Grail, the cup said to have been used at the Last Supper, and the long search for it gave us the lasting idea of a grail as the ultimate, almost unreachable prize. The single spelling that survives in English keeps the simple ai of the French, which is why the word looks deceptively plain for something with such a tangled history.

How the word is built

• grail (from Medieval Latin gradalis: a dish or serving platter)