Use great for anything big, excellent or important, and grate for shredding food, a harsh scraping noise, a metal grid, or something that irritates you. Memory hook: you grate cheese with a grater, and great has the eat in it, like a great meal.
The core difference
Great is an adjective meaning big or excellent; grate is mainly a verb for shredding, scraping or irritating.
- great — very large, excellent or important: That was a great meal, thank you.
- grate — to shred food, or to irritate: Grate the cheese before adding it to the sauce.
- grate — also a noun for a fireplace frame or a metal grid: She stacked logs on the grate before lighting the fire.
How to tell them apart
Great is an adjective, so it describes nouns: a great job, a great crowd, one of the great leaders. It also goes before grand- in words like great-grandmother.
Grate is mostly an action. The mix-up shows up in the phrase grates on me, meaning something irritates you: His constant complaining really grates on me. Writing great on me would change the meaning entirely. It also appears in recipes, where grate is the instruction and great is only a compliment.
