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flan.

A baked tart with a sweet or savoury filling in an open-topped pastry case.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/flæn/Received-Pronunciation/flan/British, Northern-England, Scotland, Southern, Standard, Wales/flɑn/General-American
  1. A baked tart with a sweet or savoury filling in an open-topped pastry case.

    Australia · UK
  2. A dessert of congealed custard, often topped with caramel, especially popular in Spanish-speaking countries.

    Belize · US
  3. A coin die.

Where this word comes from

Borrowed around 1846 from French flan (“cheesecake, custard tart, flan”), or in some uses (in reference to Spanish/Latin American flans) later from Spanish flan (itself from the French), both from Old French flaon (whence also Middle English flaon, flaun (“pie; cake”)), from Late Latin fladō (“flat cake”), from Frankish *flaþō (“flat cake”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleth₂- (“broad, flat”); compare German Fladen. Akin to Old High German flado (“flat cake, offering cake”). Doublet of flathe. Although the -n is generally believed to derive from the Late Latin accusative form (fladonem) of fladō (“flat cake”), it might alternatively derive from an inflected form of the Frankish word (such as the Frankish accusative *flaþan, or the like). For a similar case, see garden.

verb
  1. To splay or bevel internally, as a window-pane.

noun/flæn/
  1. A fan of the U.S. TV series Firefly.

    informal · slang
Where this word comes from

English, from a slip of the tongue by actor Nathan Fillion.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.