wafer

英文词源

wafer

wafer: [14] Wafer and waffle [18] are essentially the same word. Both come ultimately from a Low German term whose underlying etymological meaning was of a ‘honeycomb’- patterned cake or biscuit – a sense wafer has since lost. The ancestral form was wāfel, which seems to have come from the prehistoric Germanic base *wab-, *web- (source of English weave) and is probably related to German wabe ‘honeycomb’.

Old French borrowed Middle Low German wāfel as gaufre (which is where English got goffer ‘crimp’ [18] from). The Anglo-Norman version of this was wafre – whence English wafer. Waffle was borrowed direct into American English from Dutch wafel. (The verb waffle ‘speak verbosely’ [19], incidentally, is not the same word. It is a derivative of an earlier waff [17], used for the sounds a dog makes, which like woof was of imitative origin.)
=> goffer, waffle, weave, web

wafer (n.)

late 14c., "thin cake of paste, generally disk-shaped," from Anglo-French wafre, Old North French waufre "honeycomb, wafer" (Old French gaufre "wafer, waffle"), probably from Frankish *wafel or another Germanic source (compare Flemish wafer, altered from Middle Dutch wafel "honeycomb;" see waffle (n.)). Eucharistic bread first so called 1550s.