Scone
name, noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A small, rich, pastry or quick bread, sometimes baked on a griddle.
"On Wednesdays I go shopping / And have buttered scones for tea"
- 2 small biscuit (rich with cream and eggs) cut into diamonds or sticks and baked in an oven or (especially originally) on a griddle wordnet
- 3 Frybread served with honey butter spread on it.
"Dinner rolls and deep-fried crusty scones that border on loaf-size or juicy fruit pies tagged with county-fair blue ribbons rise from backroad eating sites."
- 4 The head. Australia, New-Zealand, informal
"…the white ball left a 5cm gash on his scone despite a floppy white hat absorbing some of the impact."
- 1 To hit on the head. Australia, New-Zealand, slang, transitive
- 1 A village north of Perth in Scotland; the coronation site of Scottish kings until 1651
"ROSS: Will you to Scone? MACDUFF: No, cousin, I'll to Fife."
- 2 A town in the Upper Hunter council area, eastern New South Wales, Australia
Example
More examples"She's having tea with her scone."
Etymology
Originally Scots, possibly from Middle Low German schö̂ne (“fine flour bread”), or Middle Dutch schoonbroot (“fine bread; a kind of flat angular loaf”), from schoon (“fine”) + broot (“bread”); alternatively, Scottish Gaelic sgonn (“lump, mouthful”).
Possibly of Teutonic/West Germanic origin, from Proto-West Germanic *skaunī (“fine, beautiful”), the source of modern German schön. Or, alternatively from Scottish Gaelic sgonn (“block, lump, hunk”); in either case, it would probably be related to English scone (“small biscuit”).
Related phrases
More for "scone"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.