Grain

How to spell grain

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grain

What does grain mean?

1. nounThe small hard seed of a cereal plant such as wheat, rice or barley, or such seeds collectively.
2. nounA single small hard piece of a substance such as sand, salt or sugar.
3. nounThe direction, arrangement or pattern of fibres in wood, leather, stone or fabric.
4. nounA very small unit of weight in the troy and apothecary systems, equal to about 65 milligrams.

Grain in a sentence

• The farmer stored the harvested grain in a tall silo.

• A single grain of sand had jammed the watch mechanism.

• Sand the table along the grain to avoid scratching the surface.

• The old apothecary system measured each dose by the grain rather than by the gram.

• Global grain prices rose sharply after the poor harvest.

• She added a grain of salt to balance the sauce.

Where does grain come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin granum, which simply meant a seed or a single grain of corn. It travelled into English through Old French grain during the 1200s, keeping its core sense of a small hard seed of a cereal plant. From the literal cereal seed, English speakers stretched the meaning to cover any tiny particle, such as a grain of sand or salt, and then to the smallest unit in the old apothecary and troy weight systems, originally the weight of a single barley seed. A separate but related development gave us the grain of wood or stone, meaning the pattern of fibres or layers, because they resembled rows of seeds. The same granum root sits inside familiar relatives like granary, granule, pomegranate and even garner, which is why the spelling keeps that plain -ain ending.

How the word is built

• grain (from Latin granum: seed, grain), borrowed whole as a single root with no affixes