English Explanatory Dictionary

flake

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A loose filmy mass or a thin chiplike layer of anything
  2. A scale of a fish or similar animal
  3. A prehistoric tool chipped out of stone.
  4. A person who is impractical, flighty, unreliable, or inconsistent; especially with maintaining a living.
  5. A carnation with only two colours in the flower, the petals having large stripes.
  6. A flat turn or tier of rope.
  7. A corrupt arrest, e.g. to extort money for release or merely to fulfil a quota.
  8. A wire rack for drying fish.
verb
  1. To break or chip off in a flake.
  2. To prove unreliable or impractical; to abandon or desert, to fail to follow through.
  3. To store an item such as rope or sail in layers
  4. To hit (another person).
  5. To plant evidence to facilitate a corrupt arrest.
  6. To lay out on a flake for drying.
noun
  1. Dogfish.
  2. The meat of the gummy shark.
noun
  1. A paling; a hurdle.
  2. A platform of hurdles, or small sticks made fast or interwoven, supported by stanchions, for drying codfish and other things.
  3. A small stage hung over a vessel's side, for workmen to stand on while calking, etc.
  4. Alternative form of fake (“turn or coil of cable or hawser”).
name
  1. A surname.

Pronunciation

/fleɪk/ en-us-flake.ogg EN-AU ck1 flake.ogg LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-flake.wav

Word forms

flake flakes flaking flaked

Etymology

From Middle English flake (“a flake of snow”), from Old English flacca and/or Old Norse flak (“loose or torn piece”) (compare Old Norse flakna (“to flake or chip”)), from Proto-Germanic *flaką (“something flat”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- (“flat, broad, plain”). Cognate with Norwegian flak (“slice, sliver”, literally “piece torn off”), Swedish flak (“a thin slice”), Danish flage (“flake”), German Flocke (“flake”), Dutch vlak (“smooth surface, plain”) and vlok (“flake”), as well as with Latin plaga (“flat surface, district, region”) and Welsh llech (“slate, tablet”). Doublet of plage.

Synonyms

fleak

Derived words

antiflake branflake bread flake cornflake flakable flakage flakeboard Flakegate flakeless flakelet flakelike flakeproof flaker flake salt flake white flaky microflake nanoflake oatflake pentaflake rye flake snowflake soapflake soap flake sootflake wheatflake beflake flakeable flake down flake off flake out
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
Back to search All on F Russian dictionary Dahl dictionary