Muffin
nounA small individual cake or soft round of bread, often eaten at breakfast.
How to spell muffin
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce muffin
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does muffin mean?
- nounA small individual cake or soft round of bread, often eaten at breakfast.
Muffin in a sentence
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She warmed a blueberry muffin for breakfast.
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The cafe sells a different muffin flavour every weekend.
Where does muffin come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The origin of muffin is not entirely settled, which is why dictionaries hedge their entries. The most widely accepted account traces it to a Low German word, muffen, the plural of muffe, meaning a small cake, and some scholars connect it further to the Old French moflet, an adjective describing bread that was soft. The word surfaces in English in the early 1700s, naming a soft, flat, yeasted round that was cooked on a griddle and sold in the street by the muffin man. Over time the term split: in Britain it still tends to mean that flat, toastable bread, while in North America it more often means a small sweet cake baked in a cup-shaped tin. The doubled f and the unstressed second syllable are the only real spelling snags, and the simple muff- start makes them easy to anchor.
How the word is built
- muff- (probably from a Low German word for a small cake)
- -in (diminutive-style noun ending)
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