Other forms: waffles, waffling, waffled
A waffle is the square breakfast cake with a pattern of little pockets that hold syrup. Belgian waffles, a waffle iron, waffles and bacon.
The pockets are the whole point and are made by the waffle iron pressing the batter between two patterned plates. Belgian waffles are thicker with deeper pockets. In British English there is also a potato waffle, which is a savoury frozen thing entirely unrelated. And to waffle is to talk or write at length without saying anything — stop waffling — which is one of the most useful verbs in the language.
1nounwaffleA cake baked with a pattern of small square pockets.
“We had waffles with maple syrup and strawberries for breakfast.”
2verbtalkTo talk or write at length without saying anything.
“He waffled for twenty minutes and answered nothing.”
waffle is a cake, or empty talk.
Dutch wafel comes from a root meaning to weave, the same as web — named for the woven pattern pressed into it. The talking sense is a separate English word from waff, an old word for a yelp.
Proto-Indo-European
*webʰ- — to braid, weave
Proto-Germanic
*wēbilǭ
Old Dutch
*wāvila
Middle Dutch
wafel
Dutch
wafel — waffle; wafer
English, today
waffle
The noun is borrowed from Dutch wafel (“waffle; wafer”), from Middle Dutch wafel, wafele, wavel, from Old Dutch wāvila, from Proto-Germanic wēbilǭ, wēbilō, possibly related to Proto-Indo-European webʰ- (“to braid, weave”) (whence Dutch weven (“to weave”) and English weave; compare, from the same verbal root, German Wabe (“honeycomb”), given that the grid pattern of the traditional Dutch lent and holiday pastry strikingly resembles a honeycomb), and possibly reinforced by German Waffel (“waffle; wafer”). The English word is a a doublet of wafer and gauffre. The verb (“to smash”) derives from the manner in which batter is pressed into the shape of a waffle between the two halves of a waffle iron.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Food & Drink, Ways of Speaking