Tile
nounA thin, flat piece of baked clay, stone, or similar material used to cover roofs, floors, or walls.
How to spell tile
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce tile
What does tile mean?
- nounA thin, flat piece of baked clay, stone, or similar material used to cover roofs, floors, or walls.
- verbTo cover a surface with flat slabs of clay, stone, or similar material.
Tile in a sentence
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noun
One cracked tile in the bathroom let water seep behind the wall.
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verb
They plan to tile the entire shower wall over the weekend.
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noun
The builder matched the new roof tile to the original colour.
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verb
A professional was hired to tile the new patio.
Where does tile come from?
Language of origin: Latin
The word comes from the Latin tegula, which meant a roofing tile or covering slab, and that noun was built on the verb tegere, meaning 'to cover'. The same covering idea sits behind related English words such as 'protect' and 'detect', which descend from the same Latin root. The Romans carried their tile-making technology across Europe, and the word was absorbed into Old English as tigele long before the Norman Conquest, where it referred to baked clay used for roofing. Over the centuries the spelling smoothed down to the modern 'tile', and the meaning broadened from roof coverings to the glazed squares used on floors, walls, and bathrooms. Because the word arrived so early and settled into a simple, regular form, it has none of the spelling traps that plague its longer Latin cousins.
How the word is built
- tile (from Old English tigele, ultimately Latin tegula: a roofing tile)
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