Lattice

How to spell lattice

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lattice

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lattice mean?

1. nounA framework or pattern of crossed wooden or metal strips, often forming a diamond grid.
2. nounA regular repeating arrangement of atoms or points in a crystal or geometric structure.

Lattice in a sentence

• Climbing roses covered the wooden lattice along the garden wall.

• The textbook diagram showed each atom sitting at a fixed point in the crystal lattice.

• The builder fitted a decorative lattice under the porch to hide the pipes.

• Impurities in the metal distort its underlying lattice.

Where does lattice come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the early 1300s from the Old French lattis, meaning latticework, which was built on latte, a thin strip or lath of wood. That French latte was itself borrowed from a Germanic source, the same family that gives modern English the word lath for a slender batten used in building and plastering. The original idea was purely practical: thin wooden strips crossed and fixed together to make a screen, a fence, or a trellis for climbing plants. Over time the sense broadened to cover any regular crossed or diamond pattern, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries scientists adopted it for the orderly repeating framework of atoms in a crystal. The spelling trap lies in the doubled t, inherited straight from the French latte, followed by the soft -ice ending that sounds like a simple -is.

How the word is built

• latt- (from Old French latte: a thin wooden strip, a lath)
• -ice (noun suffix, from French -is)