flake

Meanings

Noun

• 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.
• 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 of fake

Verb

• 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.

Origin

• From Middle English flake, from Old English flacca and/or Old Norse flak (compare Old Norse flakna), from Proto-Germanic *flaką, from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- ("flat, broad, plain"). Cognate with Norwegian flak ("slice, sliver"), Swedish flak ("a thin slice"), Danish flage ("flake"), German Flocke ("flake"), Dutch vlak ("smooth surface, plain") and vlok, Latin plaga ("flat surface, district, region"). plage.
• A name given to dogfish to improve its marketability as a food, perhaps from etymology 1.
• Compare Icelandic flaki?, fleki?, Danish flage, Dutch vlaak.