pancake

From Middle English pancake, equivalent to pan +‎ cake. The juggling sense is by analogy with a pancake being tossed in a pan.

Compare Saterland Frisian Ponkouke, Ponkuuke (“pancake”), West Frisian pankoek (“pancake”), Dutch pannenkoek (“pancake”), German Low German Pannkook (“pancake”), German Pfannkuchen (“pancake”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈpæn.keɪk/, /ˈpæŋ.keɪk/

• Audio (US)

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pancake (plural pancakes)

1. A thin batter cake fried in a pan or on a griddle in oil or butter.
2. (theater) A kind of makeup, consisting of a thick layer of a compressed powder.
3. (juggling) A type of throw, usually with a ring where the prop is thrown in such a way that it rotates round an axis of the diameter of the prop.
   • 2004, Beinn Muir <bm260@nospam4me.cam.ac.uk>, “Ring juggling: pancake throws”, in rec.juggling, Usenet‎:

     have been working on pancake throws with rings for the past few months and I have been trying to make the throws perfectly spun and as consistent as possible.

4. Anything very thin and flat.
   • 2004, William H. Cropper, Great Physicists

     Most of the electrons would pass through the hadron pancake with no interaction, but a few would collide […]

• (thin fried batter cake): crêpe/crepe, flapjack, griddle cake, hotcake, pikelet

pancake (third-person singular simple present pancakes, present participle pancaking, simple past and past participle pancaked)

1. (intransitive) To make a pancake landing.
2. (construction, demolition) To collapse one floor after another.
3. (transitive) To flatten violently.
   • 2011, Joseph Wambaugh, Floaters

     Poor old Sleepy suffered from an on-duty head injury he'd got by chasing a Corvette on a police motorcycle, ending up like a pancaked roadkill with half his scalp flapping in the backwash of freeway commuters […]

• blintz
• okonomiyaki
• Pan-Cake
• waffle

• cakepan

• ponkake, pankake, panne cake

From panne (“pan”) +‎ cake.

• IPA^(key): /ˈpankaːk(ə)/

pancake

1. pancake (kind of fried cake)

• English: pancake
• Scots: pancake

• “panne-cāke (n.)” in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-07-05.

pancake f (plural pancakes)

1. Dated form of panqueca.