Grill

How to spell grill

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grill

What does grill mean?

1. verbTo cook food using direct heat from above or below, as on metal bars or under a flame.
2. nounA cooking appliance or section of a cooker that applies direct heat to food.
3. verbTo question someone persistently and severely.

Grill in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to grill the salmon for just four minutes a side.

• noun

  He scrubbed the grill after the steaks left a greasy crust.

• verb

  The detectives planned to grill the suspect for several hours.

• verb

  You can grill the vegetables until the edges char slightly.

• noun

  The cheese turned golden under the grill in two minutes.

• verb

  Reporters will grill the minister about the missing funds.

Where does grill come from?

Language of origin: French

Grill comes from the French gril, the name for a gridiron, which is a frame of metal bars used to cook food over heat. That French word descends from the Latin craticula, meaning a small grate or lattice, a diminutive of cratis, which meant wickerwork or hurdle. English borrowed the cooking word in the seventeenth century, and the figurative sense of grilling someone, meaning to question them relentlessly as if roasting them over a fire, grew up in the nineteenth century. The closely related noun grille, the metal grating on a car front or a ticket window, comes from exactly the same root, which is why the two spellings are so easily muddled. Remember that the everyday cooking and questioning word keeps the plain ending, just grill, while grille with the final e is the decorative metal screen.

How the word is built

• grill (from French gril: a gridiron, a frame of metal bars)

Words that sound like grill

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

• grille: A framework of metal bars or wire that covers an opening, protecting it or letting air pass through.