If something is granulated, it has been made into tiny hard grains — little bits you can pour, not a fine powder and not one big lump. The phrase you will meet almost every time is granulated sugar: that ordinary white sugar in the kitchen bag, the kind that looks like very small crystals. Though actually, in a lot of homes people just say “sugar” and they already mean this. It is not the soft snow you dust on a cake, and it is not the big clear rocks some people drop into tea. The same idea turns up on other packets — granulated garlic, granulated stock — meaning the stuff was dried into grains so it is easy to spoon. The word is calm and a little technical: you see it on labels more than you hear it in chat.