Other forms: dishes
A dish is one prepared food — soup is a dish, so is a pizza. The main dish, a local dish, a dish of rice.
It is also the shallow container food is served in: a serving dish, an oven dish. And the plural, the dishes, means all the plates and pans to be washed: do the dishes, dish washing. A satellite dish is named for the shape. The verb dish out means to serve or distribute — dishing out advice — and dish up means to serve a meal. Note dishy, British slang for attractive.
1noundishOne prepared food.
“The main dish takes four hours and the pudding takes ten minutes.”
Patterna + adjective + dish (main, side, signature) · a dish of + noun · the national dish
2nounshallowA shallow container for food.
“Put it in a wide dish rather than a deep one.”
3nounplatesThe plates and pans to be washed.
“Somebody has to do the dishes and it is never him.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
dish is a food or container.
DISH → a whole FISH on it
A whole fish on a long plate, with lemon round it: one prepared food like that is a dish.
hooks ontofish
Latin discus, a disc or plate, came into Old English very early. The same Latin word gave desk, disc and dais, so a dinner plate, an office desk and a compact disc are the same word taking four different routes into English.
Latin
discus
Proto-West Germanic
*disk — table; dish
Old English
disċ — plate; bowl; dish
Middle English
dissh
English, today
dish
From Middle English dissh, disch, from Old English disċ (“plate; bowl; dish”), from Proto-West Germanic disk (“table; dish”) (whence also dъska, whence Bulgarian дъска́, Polish deska, Russian доска́), Russian чан) from Latin discus. a doublet of dais and desk and disc and discus and disk and diskos. 2 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”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA