Fries are long, thin pieces of potato cooked in hot oil until they are crisp outside and soft inside. In American English this is the usual word; people also say French fries. In British English people more often say chips for the same hot sticks, and those chips are often thicker. The word is almost always plural: we order fries, not fry, though one stick can be called a fry. It is an informal food word — menus, snack bars, “Do you want fries with that?” Nothing here is about a town or a family name Fries (that look-alike comes from a mill owner, Francis Henry Fries, with a surname mixed from Friesland and French friche, “fallow land”). This entry is only the potatoes.