Waffle

How to spell waffle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce waffle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does waffle mean?

1. nounA crisp batter cake baked in a hinged iron that presses a grid pattern into both sides.
2. verbTo talk or write at length in a vague way without saying anything substantial.
3. verbTo be unable to decide between options; to keep changing your position.

Waffle in a sentence

• noun

  She poured maple syrup over a warm waffle at breakfast.

• verb

  Candidates who waffle at interview rarely answer the actual question.

• verb

  Investors who waffle on every decision tend to miss the best opportunities.

• noun

  The cafe served each waffle with fresh berries and cream.

• verb

  The report tends to waffle for pages before reaching its point.

• verb

  The committee continued to waffle over which contractor to hire.

Where does waffle come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The food sense arrived from Dutch wafel in the early 1700s, a batter cake cooked between two hot patterned irons; that Dutch word goes back to a Germanic root linked to weaving and to the honeycomb pattern pressed into the surface, and it is a close cousin of the English word wafer. The verb meaning to talk or write at great length without saying much has a quite separate ancestry: it began in northern English and Scots dialect as waff, meaning to yelp or bark like a small dog, to which the frequentative ending -le was added to suggest repeated, fussy noise. From the idea of yapping on and on came the modern sense of rambling indecisively or padding out empty words. In American usage the verb drifted further toward meaning to vacillate or refuse to commit, as if wavering between choices. The shared spelling is a coincidence of two roots converging, but for spellers the only real trap is the doubled f and the silent final e, both inherited intact from the Dutch wafel.

How the word is built

• waffle (from Dutch wafel, a batter cake baked in a patterned iron); the 'talk vaguely' verb is a separate frequentative of the dialect verb waff, to yelp or bark, with the -le frequentative suffix