Other forms: sprinkled, sprinkling, sprinkles
To sprinkle is to scatter something in small bits over the top of something else — salt over chips, flour over a work surface, sugar over strawberries. Your hand gives a little shake and it lands unevenly, which is the whole point.
Water sprinkles too: sprinkle a shirt before ironing it, a sprinkler on a lawn, sprinklers in a ceiling that soak the room the moment there is smoke. As a noun, a sprinkle is a light fall of rain or a small scattered amount — a sprinkle of parmesan, a sprinkle of rain on the windscreen. In America the coloured sugar strands on ice cream are sprinkles; in Britain they are hundreds and thousands. The word works on things you cannot touch as well: a talk sprinkled with jokes, a page sprinkled with mistakes. Watch the prepositions — sprinkle sugar ON the cake, or sprinkle the cake WITH sugar, and both are right.
1verbsprinkleTo scatter small drops or pieces of something over a surface.
“Sprinkle a little salt over the potatoes before they go in.”
Patternsprinkle sth on / over / with + noun · sprinkle lightly · a sprinkling of + noun · sprinkles
2verbspreadTo spread small amounts of something thinly through a larger thing.
“His lecture was sprinkled with jokes about his own students.”
3nounscatteredA small scattered amount; a light fall of rain.
“A sprinkle of rain hit the windscreen and stopped again.”
4nountinyTiny coloured sugar strands put on cakes and ice cream.
“She asked for chocolate ice cream with sprinkles on top.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
SPRINKLE → like a garden SPRINKLEr
Like the sprinkler on the grass in summer, but smaller: a few drops of water, a little sugar over the top of the cake.
Sprinkle came into Middle English as sprenkelen, borrowed from Middle Dutch sprenkelen. Its relatives across the water still do the same work: Dutch sprenkelen, German sprenkeln, which also means to dapple or speckle. The picture underneath every one of them is the same — small things landing scattered rather than even.
Middle Dutch
sprenkelen
Middle English
sprenkelen
English, today
sprinkle
From Middle English sprenkelen, sprynklen, from Middle Dutch sprenkelen, equivalent to sprink + le. Cognate with Dutch sprenkelen (“to sprinkle”), German Low German sprenkeln (“to sprinkle; dapple”), German sprenkeln (“to sprinkle”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA