How to say biscuit in Chinese (and how to say cookie, cracker, chip, flatbread, pastry, cake, pancake and bun)
Posted by Jonah Lopin on Sat, Aug 28, 2010 @ 09:19 PM
There is a word in Chinese 饼, pronounced bing3, which means cake, biscuit, cracker, or shaped like a cake.
If you add the word 干 [gan1], which means dry, dried, empty, and/or relatives not linked by blood, you get 饼干, which means:
- biscuit
- cookie
- cracker
- chip
- flatbread
- pastry
- cake
- pancake
- bun
- pretty much any edible cracker-sized thing
You can walk into a Chinese pastry shop and pretty much call anything 饼干 and they will know what you're talking about.

