Other forms: drizzled, drizzling, drizzles
Drizzle is very fine light rain — the kind that does not look like much and soaks you anyway. A grey drizzle, drizzle all afternoon, it is only drizzling.
In cooking, to drizzle is to pour a thin stream of oil, honey or sauce over food, deliberately and decoratively. That sense has become extremely common in recipes and food writing and is where most learners meet the word now. The two senses share the picture of something falling in a thin, unhurried stream. Note the British weather vocabulary around it: drizzle is lighter than a shower and heavier than mist, and none of it is worth an umbrella.
1nounfineVery fine light rain.
“There was a drizzle all the way home.”
2verbrainTo rain very lightly.
“It drizzled from about ten until four.”
3verbdrizzleTo pour a thin stream of liquid over food.
“Drizzle a little olive oil over the top before serving.”
Patterndrizzle sth with / over + noun · a drizzle of + liquid · drizzled with olive oil
drizzle is light rain, or a way of pouring.
DRIZZLE → a light rain of oil over the plate
A drizzle is the lightest rain there is, and to drizzle oil over the salad is to make it rain very gently on the plate.
ang-nor
drysnan — to extinguish
Middle English
drysning — a falling of dew
English, today
drizzle
Perhaps a back-formation from dryseling, a dissimilated variant of Middle English drysning (“a falling of dew”), from ang-nor drysnan (“to extinguish”), related to Old English drēosan (“to fall, to decline”), making it cognate to modern English droze and drowse. Compare also dialectal Swedish drösla.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in In the Kitchen, Weather & Seasons