A biscuit (pronounced /bskt/) is a baked edible product.

The term is used to apply to two distinctly different products in North America and the Commonwealth Nations. In the United States it relates to a small soft leavened bread, somewhat similar to a scone. In Commonwealth English, it commonly is used to refer to a small and hard, often sweetened, flour-based product, most akin in American English to a cookie, or sometimes in the case of cheese biscuits, a cracker. ETYMOLOGY The modern-day confusion in the English language around the word biscuit is created by its etymology. The Middle French word bescuit is derived from the Latin words bis (twice) and coquere (to cook), and, hence, means [1] "twice-cooked." This is because biscuits were originally cooked in a twofold process: first baked, and then dried [2] out in a slow oven. Hence: Biscotti in Medieval Italian Biscuit in Modern French Zwieback in German Beschuit in Dutch Bizcocho in Spanish This term was then adapted into English in the 14th century during the Middle Ages, in the Middle English word [3] bisquite, to represent a hard twice-baked product. However, the Dutch language from around 1703 had adopted the word koekje, a language diminutive of cake, to [4] [citation needed] have a similar meaning for a similar hard, baked product. This may be related to the Russian or Ukrainian translation, where biscuit has come to mean sponge cake. The difference between the secondary Dutch word and that of the Latin origin is that, whereas the koekje as a cake rose during baking, the biscuit, which had no rising agent, in general did not (see gingerbread/ginger biscuit), except for the expansion of heated air during the baking process. When peoples from Europe began to emigrate to the United States, the two words and their "same but different" meanings began to clash. After the American War of Independence against the British, the word cookie became the word of choice to mean a hard, twice-baked product. Further confusion has been added by the adoption of the word biscuit for a small leavened bread popular in the United States. Today, according to American English dictionary Merriam-Webster: A cookie is a "small flat or slightly raised cake."[4] A biscuit is "any of various hard or crisp dry baked product" similar to the American English terms cracker or [3] cookie. A biscuit can also mean "a small quick bread made from dough that has been rolled out and cut or dropped from [3] a spoon." Today, throughout most of the world, the term biscuit still means a hard, crisp, brittle bread, except in the United States, where it now denotes a softer bread product baked only once. In modern Italian usage, the term biscotto is used to refer to any type of hard twice-baked biscuit.