In football, gridiron means football field where two teams face each other.

The lines on a football field create a checkerboard pattern, which has given the field the moniker “gridiron,” according to sportswriter Claude H. Miller, who wrote about it in a 1911 edition of Outdoor Sports and Games.

We need to go all the way back to the 14th century to understand how the name “gridiron” came to be used to describe a metal grid for cooking over a fire.

Now go back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when modern football was only beginning to set itself apart from older, related sports like rugby and association football (now known as soccer).

One of the most distinguishing features of football, in addition to the adoption of hard plastic helmets and shoulder pads, the forward pass, a line of scrimmage, and other distinctive features, was the playing field. Football grounds were designated with a gridiron-like checkerboard layout up until the early 1920s.