pancake
Pluralpancakes
Verbpancakes, pancaking, pancaked
Pluralpancakes
Formspancakes, pancaking, pancaked
- 1A leavened batter cake fried in a pan or on a griddle, thicker and fluffier than the English style.
She poured warm syrup over a fluffy pancake at breakfast.
The recipe makes light, raised pancakes that puff up on the griddle.
Similarhotcake, flapjack, griddlecake
Note
In the US, and in Scotland too, the same name goes to a raised, leavened cake thick enough to stack and slice. That thickness lets the word work as a mass noun as well as a count noun. Alice A. Deck pictures a plate of pancakes beside a fork holding "a slice of pancake." When a recipe's origin is unclear, leavening is the tell: this cake rises, and the English crepe-like cake mostly does not.
- 2A thin batter cake fried in a pan, often unleavened and similar to a crepe, as eaten in England.
On Shrove Tuesday she tossed a pancake in the pan and served it with lemon.
Her pancakes came out so thin they could be rolled around a filling.
Similarcrepe
Note
The word is older than either recipe. Middle English already had pancake and panne cake, plainly pan plus cake, perhaps shaped by Middle Low German pannekôke, where the compound goes back much further. In England the name usually means a thin, often unleavened cake close to a crepe. A reader raised on the fluffy American kind should picture something flatter and lighter on the plate.
- 3A type of stage makeup consisting of a thick layer of compressed powder.
Under the hot lights, the cast applied pancake to keep their faces from shining.
The makeup artist sponged a smooth layer of pancake across the actor's jaw.
Note
On the stage the word becomes a material, so it usually takes no article. Actors wear pancake or sponge on pancake; they do not put on a pancake. Freddie Greenfield, writing in 1984, sets it beside freshly plucked eyebrows: "me wearing pancake." That bare, uncountable noun is the natural form to copy, and adding "a" will make a reader think of breakfast.
- 4Any thing or mass that has been reduced to a very thin, flat shape.
The fallen tent collapsed into a pancake of canvas and poles.
Years of pressure had compressed the sediment into thin pancakes of rock.
Note
The figurative pancake is all shape and no batter, and it sits comfortably before another noun: a pancake lens is simply a very flat one. Physicists borrow it too. William H. Cropper's Great Physicists describes electrons passing through a "hadron pancake," matter squashed thin. Wherever it appears, only the flatness carries over; nothing edible or soft is implied.
- 5To crush something flat with sudden, violent force.
The avalanche pancaked the mountain cabin within seconds.
Engineers feared the blast would pancake the adjacent structures.
Similarflatten, crush, squash, level
Note
Here something else does the flattening, and the verb needs an object to land on. Its past participle makes a vivid adjective. Joseph Wambaugh's Floaters (2011) has a policeman ending up "like a pancaked roadkill" after a motorcycle chase. The image is always sudden and brutal, which keeps it apart from gentler words like squash or press.
- 6To collapse progressively, each floor falling onto the one below.
Investigators concluded the structure had pancaked when its central columns failed.
Poorly reinforced concrete floors can pancake during a major earthquake.
Note
Engineers and demolition crews use the verb for one particular failure: the floors drop onto one another and end up stacked like pancakes on a plate. It takes no object, so a building pancakes, or has pancaked. That sets it apart from the transitive "flatten" verb, where some outside force does the crushing.
- 7To land an aircraft in a flat, level attitude, dropping it heavily onto the surface.
With one engine gone, she chose to pancake on the open field.
The damaged biplane pancaked hard but the crew walked away.
Similarcrash-land
- 8A defensive play in volleyball in which the ball rebounds off the back of a hand pressed flat to the floor.
The libero saved the rally with a desperate pancake just before the ball hit the floor.
Her diving pancake kept the play alive in the final set.
Note
A last-ditch volleyball save. Rather than reaching under the ball, the player lays a hand flat on the court and lets the ball bounce up off its back. The name comes from that hand, spread as flat as a pancake. It is countable, something a player makes or attempts, and it belongs to the moment when the ball is about to touch the floor.
- 9A box on a film or television set that an actor stands on to appear taller.
The shorter lead spent half the scene perched on a pancake to even out the eyeline.
Props quietly slid a pancake beneath him before the two-shot.
Note
This is studio slang, at home on a film or television set and rarely heard outside one. The name suits a low, flat box slid under a performer, most often to bring two actors of different heights level in the frame. The slang reading is far from the kitchen one, so general writing is clearer with "a box" or "a platform."
- 10
- 11A juggling throw, usually with a ring, in which the prop spins around an axis along its diameter.
The juggler closed the sequence with a smooth pancake that sent the ring spinning flat.
A well-timed pancake keeps the ring level as it crosses to the other hand.
Note
Jugglers use it mostly of rings. The ring turns over across its own diameter instead of spinning in its plane, much as a cook flips a pancake in the pan. The word often works as a modifier, as in "pancake throws with rings," and the craft lies in consistency. The aim is a throw spun the same way every time.
- 12A composite leather made from scraps, glue, and board, originally used for insoles and later for heels and soles.
The budget boots used pancake for the heel stacks rather than solid leather.
Shoemakers once relied on pancake to keep insole costs down.
Note
A trade name from the shoe factory for a cheap substitute in poorer grades of footwear. Davis Rich Dewey's Twelfth Census of the United States report (1903) describes heels built of scrap leather and leather board, finished with a solid leather top lift. The worker who made the material was called a pancake-maker. The word is uncountable here: shoes are made of pancake, not of pancakes.
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Origin
Inherited from Middle English pancake (panne cake, pankake), which by surface analysis is simply pan + cake. It was perhaps adapted from Middle Low German pankôke, pannekôke, from Old Saxon *pannakōko, where the compound is much older; compare Old High German phankuohho (8th century) and modern German Pfannkuchen, West Frisian pankoek, and Dutch pannenkoek. The juggling sense arose by analogy with a pancake being tossed in a pan.