Flake

How to spell flake

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flake

What does flake mean?

1. nounA small, thin, flat piece that has broken or peeled away from a larger surface.
2. verbTo break, peel, or come away in small thin pieces.
3. nounInformal term for a person who is unreliable and fails to keep commitments.

Flake in a sentence

• noun

  A single flake of snow landed on the windscreen.

• verb

  Old varnish tends to flake off the door in summer.

• noun

  He turned out to be a real flake who never showed up for plans.

• noun

  She brushed a flake of dried paint from the windowsill.

• verb

  The cooked salmon will flake easily under a fork.

• noun

  The team needed someone dependable, not another flake.

Where does flake come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Flake entered Middle English around the 1300s and is widely thought to be of Scandinavian origin, related to Old Norse words such as 'flakna', meaning 'to peel off' or 'to chip away', and 'flak', a thin slab or layer. The underlying Germanic sense was always something broad and flat that splits away from a larger surface, which is exactly how a snowflake or a flake of paint behaves. Over the centuries the word kept that core meaning of a small, light, flat fragment, and the verb 'to flake' for peeling away in such pieces grew naturally from the noun. The modern informal sense of a 'flake' as an unreliable person is a much later American development from the twentieth century, picturing someone whose commitments crumble and drop away like flaking paint. The spelling stays simple and phonetic, with the silent final 'e' lengthening the 'a', so the only real trap is remembering it is not spelled 'flayk'.

How the word is built

• flake (single root: a thin flat fragment); no prefix or suffix