Pretzel
noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A toasted bread or cracker usually in the shape of a loose knot.
"When I was young, the best Philadelphia could do in the way of combining music and eating—or principally drinking—was at the Mäennerchor Garden at Ninth and Green, where a pretzel might be had with a glass of beer, or a sherry cobbler"
- 2 glazed and salted cracker typically in the shape of a loose knot wordnet
- 3 Anything that is knotted, twisted, or tangled. broadly, figuratively
"he drew himself up into a regular pretzel of a boy"
- 1 To bend, twist, or contort. Canada, US, informal, transitive
"They discovered a snake pretzelled into knots."
Example
More examples"George W. Bush choked on a pretzel and fainted."
Etymology
From dialectal German Pretzel, a variant of standard Brezel, from Old High German brēzitella, from Vulgar Latin *brāchiātellus, diminutive of Latin brāchium, bracchium (“arm”); named for the appearance of folded arms.
Related phrases
More for "pretzel"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.