Other forms: grades, graded, grading
A grade is the letter or number a teacher puts on your work to say how good it was. An A on an essay, a 7 in maths, the red circle at the top of the page.
Outside school it means a level on a scale: pay grades at work, grades of steel, eggs sorted into grades by size. In American schools it also means the year you are in — she is in fourth grade — where a British school says Year 4. As a verb it is what teachers do to the work and what a machine does to fruit: grading papers, grading apples by size. Americans call a slope in a road a grade as well, a steep grade over the pass. Make the grade means to be good enough.
1noungradeA letter or number showing how good a piece of work is.~2%
“She got the top grade in the class.”
synonyms: mark, score
2nounlevelA level or rank on a scale of quality, size or pay.~71%
“He moved up a grade and got a small rise.”
3nounyearA year of school, in American English.~25%
“My brother is in the fifth grade.”
4verbgiveTo give work a mark, or to sort things by quality or size.~2%
“He spent Sunday evening grading essays.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
grade is a mark on a scale.
Also accepted in games: mark
Grade came through Middle French grade from Latin gradus, a step or a pace, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to walk or go. A grade is a step on a stair: your work stands on one of them, and so does a pay grade, and so does the slope of a road.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰradʰ-
Proto-Italic
*graðus
Latin
gradus — a step, pace, degree
Middle French
grade — a grade, degree
English, today
grade
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French grade (“a grade, degree”), from Latin gradus (“a step, pace, degree”), from Proto-Italic graðus, from Proto-Indo-European gʰradʰ-, gʰredʰ- (“to walk, go”). a doublet of gradus. Cognate with Gothic 𐌲𐍂𐌹𐌸𐍃 (“step, grade”), bar Gritt (“step, stride”), Lithuanian grìdiju (“to go, wander”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA