wafer
Americannoun
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a thin, crisp cake or biscuit, often sweetened and flavored.
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a thin disk of unleavened bread, used in the Eucharist, as in the Roman Catholic Church.
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a thin disk of dried paste, gelatin, adhesive paper, or the like, used for sealing letters, attaching papers, etc.
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Medicine/Medical. a thin sheet of dry paste or the like, used to enclose a powder to be swallowed.
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any small, thin disk, as a washer or piece of insulation.
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Electronics. a thin slice of semiconductor used as a base material on which single transistors or integrated-circuit components are formed.
verb (used with object)
noun
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a thin crisp sweetened biscuit with different flavourings, served with ice cream, etc
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Christianity a thin disc of unleavened bread used in the Eucharist as celebrated by the Western Church
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pharmacol an envelope of rice paper enclosing a medicament
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electronics a large single crystal of semiconductor material, such as silicon, on which numerous integrated circuits are manufactured and then separated
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a small thin disc of adhesive material used to seal letters, documents, etc
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of wafer
1350–1400; Middle English wafre < Middle Dutch wafer, variant of wafel waffle 1
Explanation
A very thin, crispy cookie is called a wafer. Chocolate cream sandwiched with wafers is a delicious treat. In addition to a cookie, wafer can also refer to the thin bread used during the Christian ritual of Holy Communion. These wafers are small and round. The word is used for other thin, disc-shaped objects as well, like an electronic wafer, a circular sliver of material that helps form a circuit. But the most common meaning is still the original "thin cake of paste," from a root that wafer shares with waffle.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The paper calls it the "Burnham bounce", but warns that the margin between both parties is "wafer thin".
From BBC ● Jun. 26, 2026
Cerebras uses an entire wafer as one chip through a technique called wafer-scale integration, instead of the usual process which splits a wafer into several individual die.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 23, 2026
And rather than trying to domesticate every step of a supply chain, identify the true chokepoints—the raw silicon, the wafer, the chip assembly—and secure those.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 23, 2026
Like Citi, Barclays increased its price targets based on rising estimates around the total wafer fab equipment market.
From Barron's ● Jun. 17, 2026
‘We have only got this’ — he held up a wafer of lembas — ‘and water, if the water here is fit to drink.’
From "The Two Towers" by J. R. R. Tolkien
Yet as suppliers prioritize the specialized AI memory, wafers for consumer tech will fall up to 15% short of demand, Morgan Stanley estimates.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 17, 2026
Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA make wafer fab equipment, which turns raw silicon wafers into microchips.
From Barron's ● Jun. 17, 2026
Several Catholic priests told the news agency they had been asked to ration the wafers, which are offered to the faithful as part of Mass.
From BBC ● Jun. 16, 2026
To do that, “you’d need to own a fab,” he said, referring to the fabrication facility where silicon wafers are made for chip makers.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 15, 2026
We battle Shayleen for the last six vanilla wafers.
From "The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle" by Leslie Connor
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
