flake
Plural: flakes
Noun
- a crystal of snow
- a person with an unusual or odd personality
- a small fragment of something broken off from the whole
- A loose filmy mass or a thin chiplike layer of anything
- A scale of a fish or similar animal
- A prehistoric tool chipped out of stone.
- A person who is impractical, flighty, unreliable, or inconsistent; especially with maintaining a living.
- A carnation with only two colours in the flower, the petals having large stripes.
- A flat turn or tier of rope.
- A corrupt arrest, e.g. to extort money for release or merely to fulfil a quota.
- A wire rack for drying fish.
- Dogfish.
- The meat of the gummy shark.
- A paling; a hurdle.
- A platform of hurdles, or small sticks made fast or interwoven, supported by stanchions, for drying codfish and other things.
- A small stage hung over a vessel's side, for workmen to stand on while calking, etc.
- Alternative form of fake (“turn or coil of cable or hawser”).
Verb
Verb Forms: flaked, flaking, flakes
- To peel or break off in thin, flat pieces.
- form into flakes
- "The substances started to flake"
- cover with flakes or as if with flakes
- come off in flakes or thin small pieces
- To break or chip off in a flake.
- To prove unreliable or impractical; to abandon or desert, to fail to follow through.
- To store an item such as rope or sail in layers
- To hit (another person).
- To plant evidence to facilitate a corrupt arrest.
- To lay out on a flake for drying.
Examples
- flake a fish
- flakes of dandruff
- He said he'd come and help, but he flaked.
- She makes pleasant conversation, but she's kind of a flake when it comes time for action.
- Sometimes a letter will FLAKE off a tile, making it illegible.
- The line is flaked into the container for easy attachment and deployment.
- The paint flaked off after only a year.
- There were a few flakes of paint on the floor from when we were painting the walls.
Origin / 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”), German Flocke (“flake”), Dutch vlak (“smooth surface, plain”) and vlok (“flake”), as well as with Latin plaga (“flat surface, district, region”) and Welsh llech (“slate, tablet”). Doublet of plage.
Synonyms
bit, chip, eccentric, eccentric person, flake off, fleck, geek, oddball, peel, peel off, scrap, snowflake, fleak
Scrabble Score: 12
flake: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordflake: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
flake: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary