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fika

Pronunciation: /²fiːka/

“fika” is a Swedish word. Its 5 meanings in English:

noun

  1. having coffee, tea, saft (“cordial, squash”), or the like, usually with cookies, pastries, or other (sweet) snacks, usually with others, as a social activity
  2. a coffee (or tea, etc.) break, when taking a break to do the above

verb

  1. to have fika; to have coffee
  2. to strive for, to work hard; to desire, often with the preposition efter
  3. to hurry

Etymology

This sense is attested in writing from 1910. One possible explanation is that the word is formed by backslang of the syllables in the dialectal word kaffi (“coffee”), from Dutch koffie or a similar source. Another possible etymology is that it is derived from the older verb fika (desire, crave – see § Etymology 2), in the sense of craving something sweet.

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