Word of the Week

Word of the Week (251): ROWIE (*new CSW15*) (probability 9882), by David Sutton

Continuing the theme of bread after last week's sandwiches, a ROWIE is a Scots word for a bread roll made with butter and fat, but not, so far as I know, deep-fried, which is puzzling because I thought the Scots deep-fried everything. But fear not, if you do want a deep-fried round of bread dough another new addition, TOUTON, comes to the rescue.

There are plenty of other words for bread in the form of rolls. The BAGEL or BEIGEL is a hard ring-shaped roll taking its name from the Yiddish beygel; note that in CSW15 BAGEL has now become a verb meaning to defeat in a tennis set by six games to love, alluding, I presume, to the shape of the roll which resembles a zero. It gives BAGELED or BAGELLED, BAGELING or BAGELLING.

Another roll of Yiddish origin is the BIALI (plural BIALIS) or BIALY (plural BIALIES or BIALYS), which is specifically an onion roll.

The French give us the BRIOCHE and CROISSANT, and the Germans give us SCHNECKE, 'a sweet bread roll, containing nuts and flavoured with cinnamon'. This is really more what I'd call a cake, but never mind. SCHNECKE in German means 'snail', from the shape of it. And note that it takes a German plural SCHNECKEN, not SCHNECKES*.

Finally, a couple of other 'rolls' new to CSW15, though these are not bread rolls: we have the LUMPIA, an Indonesian spring roll, and HOLUBTSI, a Polish word for cabbage rolls: this appears to be already plural and there is no singular form.