Pancake

How to spell pancake

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pancake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pancake mean?

1. nounA thin flat cake of batter fried on both sides in a pan.

Pancake in a sentence

• She flipped the pancake before the batter could burn.

• Every February the family makes a thin pancake with lemon and sugar for breakfast.

Where does pancake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound formed in Middle English by joining 'pan' and 'cake'. The first element, 'pan', comes from the Old English 'panne', a broad shallow cooking vessel, itself probably borrowed long ago from a Latin source related to 'patina', a shallow dish. The second element, 'cake', arrived from the Old Norse 'kaka', meaning a small flat baked mass of dough; this same Norse word lies behind the modern 'cake' in all its senses. By the early 1400s the two words had been welded together to name a thin flat batter cake fried in a pan, exactly the food the word still describes. Because both halves are common everyday words, the spelling is simply the two of them run together with nothing dropped or added.

How the word is built

• pan (cooking vessel, from Old English panne)
• cake (small flat baked item, from Old Norse kaka)