Gridiron is a football term inspired by
Walter Camp, "the Father of American Football," when his rules for the
game made it necessary to mark the football field with horizontal white
lines at five-yard intervals. This arrangement suggested to fans that the
word gridiron derived from griddle plus iron, for the bars running across
the field did make it resemble an iron griddle or grate. But gridiron does
not derive from grid plus iron. It was originally the name for a metal
barrel griddle and comes from the Middle English gredire, "griddle," which
in turn developed from the Old French gridel.