Rice

How to spell rice

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rice

What does rice mean?

1. nounThe small white or brown grain harvested from a cereal grass and eaten as a staple food.
2. verbTo press cooked food, especially potatoes, through a perforated tool to make it into small grain-like pieces.

Rice in a sentence

• noun

  She served the curry with a generous bowl of steamed rice.

• verb

  To get a smooth mash, rice the boiled potatoes before adding butter.

• noun

  The supermarket had run out of long-grain rice again.

• verb

  The chef likes to rice the cooked egg yolks over the salad.

Where does rice come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Rice arrived in English in the 1200s from Old French 'ris', which itself came from the Italian 'riso' and the Latin 'oryza'. The Latin word was borrowed from the Greek 'oryza', a name for the grain that the Greeks in turn picked up from the East, probably through an Old Iranian word related to the Sanskrit 'vrihi', meaning the rice plant. The long journey across so many trading languages explains why the modern spelling looks nothing like its distant Eastern ancestor. Because the word travelled through French and Latin, the soft 'c' before 'e' became the standard way to write the final sound, which is the small trap for spellers who might otherwise reach for an 's'. The same Greek 'oryza' also survives in the scientific name 'Oryza sativa' that botanists still use for the cultivated crop.

How the word is built

• rice (single root noun, no affixes)