Other forms: croissants
A croissant is the curved French breakfast pastry with buttery layers. Crisp outside, and it shatters when you tear it.
The layers come from folding butter into dough over and over, which is called lamination and takes most of a day. Despite the name it is Austrian in origin and came to Paris in the nineteenth century. The shape is a crescent, which is what the word means in French. Pronouncing it is a small social minefield in English, and both the French and the anglicised versions are widely accepted.
1nouncroissantA crescent-shaped French pastry made from layered buttery dough.
“He had a croissant and a black coffee.”
A croissant is a crescent. French croissant is the present participle of croître, to grow, and it is the very same word as crescent: the growing moon, and the pastry cut to its shape.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱer- (grow)
French
croissant — crescent
English, today
croissant
Built from
From croissant. French croissant (“crescent”), present participle of croître (“to grow”). a doublet of crescent.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA