Skillet

How to spell skillet

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce skillet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does skillet mean?

1. nounA frying pan, typically with a long handle and shallow sloping sides, used for cooking on a stove.

Skillet in a sentence

• She heated a little oil in the cast iron skillet before adding the onions.

• He scrubbed the skillet clean and hung it back on the kitchen rack.

Where does skillet come from?

Language of origin: French

Skillet appears in late Middle English, and its origins are only partly certain. The most widely accepted account traces it to the Old French escuelete, a diminutive of escuele meaning 'a dish' or 'a bowl', which itself descends from the Latin scutella, a 'small serving tray' or 'salver'. On this reading the word once named a small dish before it came to mean a long-handled cooking pan, and the final -et carries the old diminutive sense of 'little'. Some scholars instead connect it to a Scandinavian or Germanic word for a wooden vessel, so the trail is not entirely clean. Either way, the everyday spelling trap is the same: the double l in the middle and the single t at the end, which is why etymology_confidence here is medium rather than high.

How the word is built

• skill- (uncertain root, possibly from a word for a small dish)
• -et (diminutive suffix)