flake

• (UK) IPA^(key): /fleɪk/

• Audio (US):

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• Audio (General Australian):

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• Audio (Southern England):

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• Hyphenation: flake
• Rhymes: -eɪk

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.

flake (plural flakes)

1. A loose filmy mass or a thin chiplike layer of anything

   Synonym: (obsolete except Britain, dialectal) fleak

   There were a few flakes of paint on the floor from when we were painting the walls.

   flakes of dandruff

   • 1971, Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat:

     And you treated my woman to a flake of your life. And when she came back she was nobody's wife.

2. A scale of a fish or similar animal
3. (archaeology) A prehistoric tool chipped out of stone.
4. (informal) A person who is impractical, flighty, unreliable, or inconsistent; especially with maintaining a living.

   She makes pleasant conversation, but she's kind of a flake when it comes time for action.

   • 2020 October 23, Walter Kirn, “The Cautionary Tale of Adam Neumann and WeWork”, in New York Times‎:

     The center encouraged its devotees to wear lucky red strings around one wrist, which Neumann did for quite a while, until a more sober-minded business person warned him to lose the item or risk confirming his burgeoning reputation as a flake.

5. A carnation with only two colours in the flower, the petals having large stripes.
6. A flat turn or tier of rope.
   • 1634, Nathaniel Boteler, Boteler's Dialogues:

     Admiral: What mean you by flakes?
     Captain: They are only those several circles or rounds of the roapes or cables, that are quoiled up round.

   • 1944, Clifford W. Ashley, The Ashley Book of Knots, Doubleday, pages 516–517:

     A flake is the sailor's term for a turn in an ordinary coil, or for a complete tier in a flat coil, as a French or Flemish flake. The current dictionary form of the word is fake, a word that I have never heard used with this meaning.
     A Flemish flake is a spiral coil of one layer only.

7. (US, law enforcement, slang) A corrupt arrest, e.g. to extort money for release or merely to fulfil a quota.
   • 1973, Knapp Commission, New York, The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption, page 83:

     When police decided to score gamblers, they would most often flake people with gambling slips, then demand $25 or $50 for not arresting them. Other times, they would simply threaten a flake and demand money.

8. A wire rack for drying fish.

flake (third-person singular simple present flakes, present participle flaking, simple past and past participle flaked)

1. To break or chip off in a flake.

   Synonym: (obsolete, rare) fleak

   The paint flaked off after only a year.

2. (colloquial) To prove unreliable or impractical; to abandon or desert, to fail to follow through.

   He said he'd come and help, but he flaked.

3. (technical) To store an item such as rope or sail in layers

   The line is flaked into the container for easy attachment and deployment.

4. (Ireland, slang) To hit (another person).
5. (US, law enforcement, slang) To plant evidence to facilitate a corrupt arrest.
   • 1973, Knapp Commission, New York, The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption, page 83:

     When police decided to score gamblers, they would most often flake people with gambling slips, then demand $25 or $50 for not arresting them. Other times, they would simply threaten a flake and demand money.

6. To lay out on a flake for drying.

   flake a fish

• beflake
• flakeable
• flake down
• flake off
• flake out

A name given to dogfish to improve its marketability as a food, perhaps from etymology 1.

flake (uncountable)

1. (UK) Dogfish.
2. (Australia) The meat of the gummy shark.
   • 1999, R. Shotton, Case studies of the management of elasmobranch fisheries, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Part 1, page 746:

     Larger shark received about 10%/kg less than those in the 4-6 kg range. Most of the Victorian landed product is wholesaled as carcasses on the Melbourne Fish Market where it is sold to fish and chip shops, the retail sector and through restaurants as ‘flake’.

   • 2002, Alex Miller, Journey to the Stone Country, Allen & Unwin, published 2003, page 72:

     Susan said, ‘Get me a piece of flake and a serve of chips.’

   • 2007, Archie Gerzee, WOW! Tales of a Larrikin Adventurer‎, page 141:

     The local fish shop sold a bit of flake (shark) but most people were too spoiled to eat shark. The main item on the Kiwi table was still snapper, and there was plenty of them, caught by the Kiwis themselves, so no shortage whatsoever.

Compare Icelandic flaki, Icelandic fleki, Danish flage, Dutch vlaak.

flake (plural flakes)

1. (UK, dialect) A paling; a hurdle.
2. A platform of hurdles, or small sticks made fast or interwoven, supported by stanchions, for drying codfish and other things.
   • 1613, Gervase Markham, English Husbandman:

     You shall also, after they be ripe, neither suffer them to have straw nor fern under them, but lay them either upon some smooth table, boards, or flakes of wands, and they will last the longer.

3. (nautical) A small stage hung over a vessel's side, for workmen to stand on while calking, etc.
4. (nautical) Alternative form of fake (“turn or coil of cable or hawser”)
   • 1898, Frank T. Bullen, The Cruise of the Cachalot: The Story of a New Bedford Whaler:

     Flake after flake ran out of the tubs, until we were compelled to hand the end of our line to the second mate to splice his own on to.

• “flake”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• fleak