Grid

How to spell grid

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grid

What does grid mean?

1. nounA pattern of evenly spaced lines that cross to form squares, used for reference, layout, or measurement.
2. nounThe connected network of cables and stations that distributes electricity across a region.

Grid in a sentence

• The surveyor marked each field reference on the map grid.

• The new wind farm will feed power straight into the national grid.

• The designer aligned every column to a strict layout grid.

• Engineers worked overnight to restore the grid after the storm.

Where does grid come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Grid is a nineteenth-century shortening of gridiron, the metal frame of parallel bars used for cooking over a fire. Gridiron itself came from Middle English gredire, an altered form of gredil, the ancestor of the modern word griddle, and that family traces back to Latin craticula, meaning a small grating or gridiron. The literal idea throughout has been a lattice of crossed or parallel bars, and that image carried naturally into other senses: the printed network of lines on a map, the framework of intersecting streets in a planned city, and the connected web of cables that carries electricity. The compact form grid only appeared once people began naming such regular patterns of lines, roughly in the 1830s. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, its single consonant ending after the short vowel almost never causes spelling trouble.

How the word is built

• grid (back-formation from gridiron)