Dictionaries › English

tile

Pronunciation: /taɪl/

The English word “tile” has 10 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A regularly-shaped slab of clay or other material, affixed to cover or decorate a surface, as in a roof-tile, glazed tile, stove tile, carpet tile, etc.
  2. A rectangular graphic.
  3. Any of various flat cuboid playing pieces used in certain games, such as dominoes, Scrabble, or mahjong.
  4. A stiff hat.
  5. A Lego piece that is 1/3 the height of a brick, and is smooth without studs on top.

verb

  1. To cover with tiles.
  2. To arrange in a regular pattern, with adjoining edges (applied to tile-like objects, graphics, windows in a computer interface).
  3. To optimize (a loop in program code) by means of the tiling technique.
  4. To seal a lodge against intrusions from unauthorised people.
  5. To protect from the intrusion of the uninitiated.

Etymology

From Middle English tile, tyl, tigel, tiȝel, teȝele, from Old English tiġele, tieġle, tiġle (“tile, brick”), from Proto-West Germanic *tigulā (“tile, brick”), from Proto-Germanic *tigulǭ (“tile, brick”), from Latin tēgula, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)teg- (“to cover”). Doublet of tegula. Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Tichel (“tile”), Dutch tichel (“brick”), tegel (“tile”), German…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “tile” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.