Word.ws English Dictionary

engrail

/ɪŋˈɡɹeɪl/

engrail verb: to make rough.

Verb (1)

engrail (third-person singular simple present engrails, present participle engrailing, simple past and past participle engrailed)

  1. (transitive) To make rough.
  2. (intransitive) To form an edging or border; to run in curved or indented lines.
    • Fine gold engrail'd adorns the figur'd floora. 1718, Thomas Parnell, Solomon

Verb (2)

engrail (third-person singular simple present engrails, present participle engrailing, simple past and past participle engrailed)

  1. (transitive) To variegate or spot, as with hail.
    • a caldron new engrailed with twenty hues[1611?], Homer, “(please specify |book=I to XXIV)”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. […], London: […] Nathaniell Butter, →OCLC; republished as The Iliads of Homer...
  2. (archaic, transitive) To indent with small curves.
    • He crossed through the high grass and went up the slope, climbing with handholds in the new turf until he gained the crest and turned to look down on the river and the city beyond, casting a gray glance along that varied world, the pieced plowland, the houses, the odd grady of the small metropolis...1979, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, Random House, page 120

Forms of engrail

third-person singular presentengrails
present participleengrailing
past participleengrailed
pastengrailed

Origin of engrail

From en- + grail.

French engrêler

Words formed from engrail

Questions about engrail

What does engrail mean?
Engrail means to make rough.
What part of speech is engrail?
Engrail is a verb.
How do you pronounce engrail?
Engrail is pronounced /ɪŋˈɡɹeɪl/.
What is the past tense of engrail?
The past tense of engrail is engrailed.

Words near engrail in the dictionary

  1. engrafters
  2. engrafting
  3. engraftment
  4. engraftments
  5. engrafts
  6. engrail
  7. engrailed
  8. engraileds
  9. engrailing
  10. engrailled
  11. engrailment

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: engrail (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “engrail.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/engrail. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.