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dish

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //dɪʃ//

A vessel such as a plate for holding or serving food, often flat with a depressed region in the middle.

noun

  1. 1

    A vessel such as a plate for holding or serving food, often flat with a depressed region in the middle.

    She brought forth butter in a lordly dish.

  2. 2

    The contents of such a vessel.

    a dish of stew

  3. 3

    A specific type of prepared food.

    a vegetable dish

    this dish is filling and easily made

    Let's carve him a dish fit for the gods

  4. 4

    Tableware (including cutlery, etc, as well as crockery) that is to be or is being washed after being used to prepare, serve and eat a meal.

    It's your turn to wash the dishes.

  5. 5

    A type of antenna with a similar shape to a plate or bowl.

    satellite dish

    radar dish

  6. 6

    datedSomething that fits someone's tastes, interests, or abilities.

    Going to the club is not my dish.

    Literacy is not every man’s dish. A teacher trying to persuade Arab men in North Africa to let their wives learn to read so that they can write letters was pointedly asked by one husband: “To whom?”

  7. 7

    slangA sexually attractive person.

    quite a dish

    Have you seen the new apothecary? I think her name is Sadie. What a dish!

  8. 8

    datedThe state of being concave, like a dish, or the degree of such concavity.

    the dish of a wheel

  9. 9

    A hollow place, as in a field.

    As I topped the ridge I missed my first shot at a sharptail that flushed from a grassy dish.

    He and Stratemeier raced across the flats and dropped into the canyon, climbed swiftly through it and came out at the topside trail , which went straight south through the timber until it dropped into a small grassy dish surrounded by rock peaks.

    Daylight revealed that the so-called summit was near the edge of a shallow, stony dish, which terminated abruptly in steep slopes, and actually offered poor fields of fire.

  10. 10

    slangThe home plate.

    He said, "I don't like your chances at the dish [home plate] tonight."

    At the plate, Graham pounded the dish three times, just like Bubbles did whenever he was up, […]

    Also, if you end up getting to the baseball, your pitcher needs to be covering home plate, which pitchers occasionally forget to do. However, if the ball stays near the dish and you have a pitcher on the mound who isn't a space-case, you've got a good shot to get the runner out.

  11. 11

    archaicA trough in which ore is measured.

  12. 12

    archaicThat portion of the produce of a mine which is paid to the land owner or proprietor.

  13. 13

    slangGossip.

    We've been a very lucky community: We've had GCN to collect our deep dish and write it up as political discourse. GCN is not just another clipboard of polite press releases. GCN is the sticky questions, the sweet moments, and the dirty stories that make up our lives.

Etymology

From Middle English dissh, disch, from Old English disċ (“plate; bowl; dish”), from Proto-West Germanic *disk (“table; dish”) (whence also Proto-Slavic *dъska, whence Bulgarian дъска́ (dăská), Polish deska, Russian доска́ (doská)), Russian чан (čan)) from Latin discus. Doublet of dais, desk, disc, discus, disk, and diskos. Cognates Cognate with Scots disch (“dish; plate”), Dutch dis (“table”), German Low German Disk, Disch (“table”), German Tisch (“table”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish disk (“dish; counter”), Icelandic diskur (“dish; plate”), Finnish tiski (“desk, counter; dish”). Compare the identical meaning expansion (vessel for food, then also content of such a vessel, then also specific type of food): Bulgarian блю́до (bljúdo), Russian блю́до (bljúdo). For the roundness aspect, compare Polish rondel (“pan, saucepan”) (< Latin rotundus (whence also English round)), Slovene krožnik < krog. Also compare typologically Proto-Slavic *misъka << Latin mēnsa; Ancient Greek πίναξ (pínax) (several meanings).

verb

  1. 1

    To put in a dish or dishes; serve, usually food.

  2. 2

    informalTo gossip; to relay information about the personal situation of another.

  3. 3

    slangTo insult, speak ill of.

    In the car with you I heard Joe's voice ― complaining about how invisible black people still are to whites; praising artists we admire; dishing someone's bad taste; planning future adventures; […]

  4. 4

    To make concave, or depress in the middle, like a dish.

    to dish a wheel by inclining the spokes

  5. 5

    archaicTo frustrate; to beat; to outwit or defeat.

    Have the Tories "dished the Whigs"?

Forms

plural
dishes
past tense
dished
past participle
dished
present participle
dishing
third person singular
dishes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).