Engineering ceramics are widely used in aerospace, 3C electronics, life sciences and other elds. However, the hard brittleness of engineering ceramics makes it di cult to process, prone to damage during processing, and di cult to balance processing e ciency and quality. In this paper, the grinding force, surface morphology, subsurface damage, residual stress and roughness values of zirconia ceramics are studied after undergoing cold air minimal quantity lubrication (CA-MQL) and traditional wet lubrication (WET) at multiple grinding depths under 0 MPa, 200 MPa and 400 MPa precompressive stresses. The results show that CA-MQL signi cantly improves the grinding surface quality when the grinding depths are 30 µm and 50 µm compared with WET. The optimized surface roughness of 400 MPa precompressive stress combined with CA-MQL grinding reaches 17.12%. Precompressive stress signi cantly reduces the surface residual compressive stress by up to 32.8%.