grain

Definitions  ·  Examples  ·  Pronunciations  ·  Etymologies  ·  Related  ·  Statistics  ·  Comments  · 
“
The dose is 1/180 of a grain, and doses should be continued heroically until 1/20 of a grain is administered, or until, in the physician's opinion, a proper quantity has been injected.

View all »
Definitions (99)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (26)

  1. noun A small, dry, one-seeded fruit of a cereal grass, having the fruit and the seed walls united: a single grain of wheat; gleaned the grains from the ground one at a time. Also called caryopsis.
  2. noun The fruits of cereal grasses especially after having been harvested, considered as a group: The grain was stored in a silo.
  3. noun A cereal grass: Wheat is a grain grown in Kansas.
23 more from this dictionary »

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (47)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (11)

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (15)

Toggle elsewhere links Elsewhere on the web

View all »
Examples (50)

  • After the grain was all “threshed out,” it was carried on top of a platform built of rails and poured out on a wagon sheet, trusting to the wind to separate the wheat kernels from the straw and chaff. —  Reminiscences of a Pioneer
  • It hurt him the more, because, after all, he had made the profit out of us for his firm; whilst the loss on the grain was his private concern. —  Diary of a Soldier of Fortune
  • "Once it gets wet again, the enzymes in the grain are activated, and the seed will degrade over time."
  • You can (supposedly) push the film to ungodly speeds (like 25,000 ISO or something crazy), though the grain will be abominable. —  Ask MetaFilter
  • Finer and smoother grain are available in this category, most notably by Kodak's own Tmax 400, but that does not always equate to a better shot. —  Epinions Recent Content for Home
More examples »
 

Tags

Sign up or sign in to add tags.

Words tagged grain

Stats

This word has been looked up 181 times.

stop updating
On Twitter

Photos from

flickr images

Add a related word »
Related

Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

corn ·  seed ·  fruit ·  salt ·  oil ·  food ·  crop ·  tobacco ·  quantity ·  wine ·  coal ·  fish

Used in the same contextWord Family

grain:   grains
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (4)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English, from Old French graine, from Latin grānum; see gr̥ə-no- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (3)

  1. Early modern English also graine, grayn, grayne, etc.; from Middle English grayn, usually greyn, grein, a grain of wheat, etc., of sand, etc., a seed, grain (of paradise), a pearl, grain of the skin, etc., from Old French grain, grein = Provencal gran, gra = Spanish grano = Portuguese grão = Italian grano, a grain, seed, = Dutch graan, grain, corn, = G. Danish Swedish gran, a grain, a particle, from Latin granum, a grain, seed, small kernel, = Anglo-Saxon and English corn: see corn. In sense 11, from Middle English grayne, greyne, a red dye, a texture dyed red, = Middle High German grān, a red dye, from Old French graine, grainne, greinne, etc., = Provencal Spanish Portuguese Italian gratia, feminine, coccus, a red dye, from Middle Latin grana, feminine, properly neuter plural, ‘grains,’ in reference to the insects collectively, plural of Latin granum, a grain.
  2. from Middle English greynen; from the noun.
  3. from Icelandic grein, the branch of a tree, a branch, arm, point, difference, = Swedish gren, branch, arm, stride, fork, = Danish gren, branch, bough, prong. Doublet, groin, q. v.
 

Pronunciations
Record your own »
/greɪn/
by American Heritage

Charts
frequency chart

Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year

Bubble height: used more or less than expected, vs. all uses evenly distributed

You can expect to see this word about once a day.

Recently looked up

enraptured · brigade · obol · strawberry · vtterance

Recent Favorites

pygopagus · sanglant · Astacus · sweetbread · qualms

Recent Pronunciations

qualms · poofter · oh for heaven's sake · embodies · silence