High speed (up to 127 m/s) and high material removal rate (up to 10 mm{sup 3}/s/mm) grinding experiments using a vitreous bond CBN wheel were conducted to investigate the effects of material removal rate, wheel speed, dwell time and truing speed ratio on cylindrical grinding of silicon nitride and zirconia. Experimental results show that the high grinding wheel surface speed can reduce the effective chip thickness, lower grinding forces, enable high material removal rate grinding and achieve a higher G-ratio. The radial feed rate was increased to as high as 0.34 {micro}m/s for zirconia and 0.25 {micro}m/s for silicon nitride grinding to explore the advantage of using high wheel speed for cost-effective high material removal rate grinding of ceramics