flour

UK /ˈflaʊ.ə/noun, verb

flour is a noun meaning “Powder obtained by grinding or milling cereal grains, especially wheat, or other foodstuffs such as soybeans and potatoes, and used to bake bread…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-L-O-U-R and has one syllable (flour), and it appears 10 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of flour is flours.

What does flour mean?

noun

1
Powder obtained by grinding or milling cereal grains, especially wheat, or other foodstuffs such as soybeans and potatoes, and used to bake bread, cakes, and pastry.
2
The food made by grinding and bolting cleaned wheat (not durum or red durum) until it meets specified levels of fineness, dryness, and freedom from bran and germ, also containing any of certain enzymes, ascorbic acid, and certain bleaching agents.
3
Powder of other material.
mustard flour
4
obsoleteObsolete form of flower.

verb

1
To apply flour to something; to cover with flour.
Flour the surface before rolling out the dough.
2
To reduce to flour.
3
To break up into fine globules of mercury in the amalgamation process.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce flour?

UK /ˈflaʊ.ə/
UK [ˈflaʊ̯.ə]
/ˈflæʊ.ə/

Flour has one syllable, split flour in writing.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-flour.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of flour

flours plural, present, singular, he/she/it
flouring participle, present
floured participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is flour?

Flour appears 10 times per million words in written English, the 7,121st most frequent word form in the list.

flour0.0010.010.11101001,00010,000

rarerper million words of written Englishmore common

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Words people confuse with flour

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

flour vs flower210 G

Also written: flower.

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

Flour in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

Language	Words
French	farine (ground cereal grains or other foodstuff), fariner, enfariner (to apply flour to something)
German	Mehl (ground cereal grains or other foodstuff), bemehlen (to apply flour to something)
Portuguese	farinha (ground cereal grains or other foodstuff), enfarinhar (to apply flour to something)
Spanish	harina, farina (disused), fariña, granillo, chuno, soma (ground cereal grains or other foodstuff)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does flour come from?

Spelled (until about 1830) and meaning flower in the sense of flour being the "finest portion of ground grain" (compare French fleur de farine, fine fleur). Doublet of fleur, flor, and flower. Partially displaced native meal. The U.S. standard of identity comes from 21CFR137.105.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).