waffle

Meanings

Noun

• A flat pastry pressed with a grid pattern, often eaten hot with butter and/or honey or syrup.
• In full potato waffle: a savoury flat potato cake with the same kind of grid pattern.
• A concrete slab used in flooring with a gridlike structure of ribs running at right angles to each other on its underside.
• A type of fabric woven with a honeycomb texture.
• (Often lengthy) speech or writing that is evasive or vague, or pretentious.
• The high-pitched sound made by a young dog; also, a muffled bark.

Verb

• To smash (something).
• To speak or write evasively or vaguely.
• Of a bird: to move in a side-to-side motion while descending before landing.
• Of an aircraft or motor vehicle: to travel in a slow and unhurried manner.
• To be indecisive about something; to dither, to vacillate, to waver.
• Often followed by on: to speak or write (something) at length without any clear aim or point; to ramble.
• To hold horizontally and rotate (one's hand) back and forth in a gesture of ambivalence or vacillation.
• Of a dog: to bark with a high pitch like a puppy, or in muffled manner.

Origin

• The noun is borrowed from Dutch wafel, from Middle Dutch wafel, wafele, wavel, from Old Dutch *wāvila, from Proto-Germanic *wēbilǭ, *wēbilō, possibly related to Proto-Indo-European *webʰ- (whence Dutch weven and English weave), and possibly reinforced by German Waffel. The English word is a wafer, and gauffre.
• The verb (“to smash”) derives from the manner in which batter is pressed into the shape of a waffle between the two halves of a waffle iron.
• . Waff is derived from Early Scots waff, from Northern Middle English wafe, waffe, a variant of waven (whence wave), from Old English wafian, from Proto-Germanic *wabōną, *wabjaną, from Proto-Indo-European *webʰ-.
• Regarding sense 5 (“to speak or write (something) at length without any clear aim or point”), compare Old English wæflian, possibly ultimately from Proto-Germanic *babalōną, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeh₂- and/or Proto-Indo-European *baba-. The Oxford English Dictionary does not derive the English word waffle from this Old English word.
• The noun is derived from the verb.