The Rice University Neologisms Database

Teeth or accoutrements thereon. Grill is an image-based metaphor that plays on the way the lines between teeth, both between adjacent teeth and upper and lower teeth, take the form of perpendicular lines, similar to a grill. As the popularity of dental accessorization has grown since the early 1990’s, when the word began to be understood to refer to teeth, ‘grill’ as also come to refer to the silver and gold fake teeth that some hip-hop artists choose to wear. For example, Houston rapper Paul Wall often refers to his set of tooth fronts, which take up the entirety of his dental ‘real estate,’ as grills.