fry [ME] The word meaning ‘to cook in hot fat or oil’ comes from the Latin verb frigere, which meant both ‘to roast’ and ‘fry’. Fry [ME] as a term for ‘young fish’ is a quite different word, which comes from Old Norse frió. If you move from a bad situation to one that is worse you have moved out of the frying pan [LME] into the fire, an expression used by the scholar and statesman Sir Thomas More in the mid 16th century. Fritters [LME] are fried food and get their name from Late Latin frictura ‘a frying’. To fritter time or money [E18th] is a different word. It is based on an old verb fitter meaning ‘to break into fragments, shred’, and may be related to German Fetzen ‘rag, scrap’.