Word of the Day

: August 4, 2010

zwieback

noun SWEE-back

What It Means

: a usually sweetened bread enriched with eggs that is baked and then sliced and toasted until dry and crisp

zwieback in Context

"It's the cheesiest of cheesecakes, with a zwieback crumb crust." (Tina Danze, The Dallas Morning News, February 2, 2000)

Did You Know?

In ages past, keeping food fresh for any length of time required a lot of ingenuity, especially when one needed to carry comestibles on a long journey. One of the solutions people came up with for keeping bread edible for traveling was to bake it twice, thereby drying it and slowing the spoiling process. The etymology of "zwieback" reflects this baker's trick; it was borrowed from a German word that literally means "twice baked." Nowadays, zwieback is not just used as a foodstuff -- the texture of the dried bread makes zwieback a suitable teething device for infants.