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pancake

UK/ˈpæn.keɪk/US/ˈpæn.keɪk/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,169 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: pancakes

A pancake is the flat round breakfast cake fried in a pan and stacked high. A stack of pancakes, pancake batter, toss the pancake.

The English kind is thin and eaten with lemon and sugar and the American kind is thick and raised with a chemical agent — the same word for two quite different foods. Batter rested for half an hour makes better ones. Pancake Day is Shrove Tuesday. Note that the compound is pan plus cake.

Mae Mu · CC0

Definitions of pancake

  1. 1nounpancakeA flat round cake fried in a pan.B2

    “We had pancakes with lemon and sugar for breakfast.”

pancake is a food.

Where it comes from

Pan plus cake, a Middle English compound. Low German pannekoke is the same compound.

  1. Middle English

    panne cake

  2. English, today

    pancake

From Middle English panne cake. Middle English pancake, panne cake, pankake, ponkake. by surface analysis, en + pan + cake. Perhaps adapted from Middle Low German pankôke, pannekôke, from Old Saxon pannakōko (suggested by derivatives Old Saxon pannakōkilo and pannakōkilīn), where the compound is much older; compare Old High German phankuohho (8th century), whence Middle High German phankuoche, German Pfannkuchen (“pancake”); further

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Food & Drink

Practise this word

pancake in the wild

  • In Scotland and North America, a leavening agent is used (typically baking powder) creating a thick fluffy pancake.

    Pancake

  • Commercially prepared pancake mixes are available in some countries.

    Pancake

  • A pancake number is the minimum number of flips required for a given number of pancakes.

    Pancake sorting

  • The pancake tortoise (Malacochersus tornieri) is a species of flat-shelled tortoise in the family Testudinidae.

    Pancake tortoise

  • Unlike most pancakes, Dutch babies are baked in the oven, rather than being fried.

    Dutch baby pancake

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.