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flake

Pronunciation: /fleɪk/

The English word “flake” has 19 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A loose filmy mass or a thin chiplike layer of anything
  2. A scale of a fish or similar animal
  3. A prehistoric tool chipped out of stone.
  4. A person who is impractical, flighty, unreliable, or inconsistent; especially with maintaining a living.
  5. A carnation with only two colours in the flower, the petals having large stripes.
  6. A flat turn or tier of rope.
  7. A corrupt arrest, e.g. to extort money for release or merely to fulfil a quota.
  8. A wire rack for drying fish.
  9. Dogfish.
  10. The meat of the gummy shark.
  11. A paling; a hurdle.
  12. A platform of hurdles, or small sticks made fast or interwoven, supported by stanchions, for drying codfish and other things.
  13. A small stage hung over a vessel's side, for workmen to stand on while calking, etc.

verb

  1. To break or chip off in a flake.
  2. To prove unreliable or impractical; to abandon or desert, to fail to follow through.
  3. To store an item such as rope or sail in layers
  4. To hit (another person).
  5. To plant evidence to facilitate a corrupt arrest.
  6. To lay out on a flake for drying.

Etymology

From Middle English flake (“a flake of snow”), from Old English flacca and/or Old Norse flak (“loose or torn piece”) (compare Old Norse flakna (“to flake or chip”)), from Proto-Germanic *flaką (“something flat”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- (“flat, broad, plain”). Cognate with Norwegian flak (“slice, sliver”, literally “piece torn off”), Swedish flak (“a thin slice”), Danish flage (“flake”),…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.