waffle

Meaning

Noun

1. A flat pastry pressed with a grid pattern, often eaten hot with butter and/or honey or syrup.
2. In full potato waffle: a savoury flat potato cake with the same kind of grid pattern.
3. A concrete slab used in flooring with a gridlike structure of ribs running at right angles to each other on its underside.
4. A type of fabric woven with a honeycomb texture.

Verb

To smash (something).

Verb

1. To speak or write evasively or vaguely.
2. Of a bird: to move in a side-to-side motion while descending before landing.
3. (colloquial) Of an aircraft or motor vehicle: to travel in a slow and unhurried manner.
4. (colloquial) To be indecisive about something; to dither, to vacillate, to waver.
5. Often followed by on: to speak or write (something) at length without any clear aim or point; to ramble.
6. To hold horizontally and rotate (one's hand) back and forth in a gesture of ambivalence or vacillation.

Verb

Of a dog: to bark with a high pitch like a puppy, or in muffled manner.

Synonyms

wafer

waver

hesitate

equivocate

wobble

pancake

twaddle

vacillate

falter

fickle

flannel

fritter

gab

gabber

gabble

gibber

gossip

griddlecake

hang back

humbug

jabber

muffin

oscillate

palaver

prate

prevaricate

scone

stall

suspect

tattle

tittle tattle

vague

verbiage

verbosity

wordiness

yammer

yap

rattle away

rambling speech

slap jack

babble

sanctimonious blethering

beat around the bush

blabber

capricious

chatter

crepe

crumpet

dither

Hyphenated as

waf‧fle

Pronounced as (IPA)

/ˈwɒf.l̩/

Etymology

The noun is borrowed from Dutch wafel (“waffle; wafer”), from Middle Dutch wafel, wafele, wavel, from Old Dutch *wāvila, from Proto-Germanic *wēbilǭ, *wēbilō, possibly related to Proto-Indo-European *webʰ- (“to braid, weave”) (whence Dutch weven (“to weave”) and English weave), and possibly reinforced by German Waffel (“waffle; wafer”). The English word is a doublet of wafer and gauffre.
The verb (“to smash”) derives from the manner in which batter is pressed into the shape of a waffle between the two halves of a waffle iron.