Grilled

How to spell grilled

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grilled

What does grilled mean?

1. verbCooked food on a metal grate over or under direct heat.
2. verbQuestioned someone closely and persistently, often in an aggressive way.

Grilled in a sentence

• The chef grilled the salmon over an open flame.

• The detectives grilled the suspect for several hours.

• They grilled burgers and sausages in the back garden all afternoon.

• The board grilled him about the missing funds.

Where does grilled come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Old French gril, a metal gridiron or grating used for cooking over a fire, which in turn came from the Latin craticula, meaning 'a small gridiron'. That Latin form was a diminutive of cratis, which literally meant 'wickerwork' or 'a hurdle of woven sticks', so the early sense centred on a lattice of bars rather than the heat itself. English borrowed the noun in the 1600s and quickly turned it into a verb for cooking food directly over or under that grating. The figurative sense of subjecting someone to intense, uncomfortable questioning grew naturally from the image of holding a person over the heat. The double 'l' in the spelling simply follows the standard English pattern of doubling a single final consonant after a short stressed vowel before adding -ed.

How the word is built

• grill (from Old French gril: gridiron)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)