Grate

How to spell grate

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grate

What does grate mean?

1. verbTo shred food by rubbing it against a rough surface, or to produce an irritating, scraping effect.
2. nounA framework of metal bars, such as the one holding fuel in a fireplace or covering a drain.

Grate in a sentence

• verb

  The recipe asks you to grate a block of cheddar over the pasta.

• noun

  She swept the ash from the iron grate before laying a new fire.

• verb

  His constant whistling began to grate on everyone in the office.

• noun

  A leaf had slipped through the grate and blocked the gutter drain.

Where does grate come from?

Language of origin: French

This single spelling actually covers two words that arrived in English by different routes and later merged in form. The verb meaning 'to shred or scrape' comes from the Old French grater, 'to scrape or scratch', which itself goes back to a Germanic root meaning to scratch; English picked it up in the 1400s and it kept the sense of rubbing something hard against a rough surface, hence grating cheese. The 'figurative' use, where a noise or a habit grates on you, grew naturally from that idea of something scraping unpleasantly. The noun meaning 'a framework of metal bars' has a separate ancestor: the Latin cratis, meaning 'wickerwork' or 'lattice', which gave Medieval Latin crata and reached English as a grid of bars over a fire or drain. Because both words ended up spelled g-r-a-t-e, the real trap is not their shared form but the homophone 'great', which sounds identical yet means large or excellent.

How the word is built

• grate (from Old French grater: to scrape; the noun sense from Latin cratis: wickerwork, lattice)

Words that sound like grate

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• great: Very large in size, amount, or importance, or extremely good and impressive.