Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
kaiser roll

kaiser roll

1 3.9
A round crusty bread roll with a crisp top often sprinkled with poppy seeds
  • noun
  • /ˈkaɪzər roʊl/
  • US
translation icon : pan kaiser
  • I've been thinking about an egg salad sandwich on a kaiser roll.
  • kaiser roll with cheese

Examples

  • He ate a kaiser roll, then drank a gin and tonic, feeling the pine-needle taste far back in his throat.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • He ordered corned beef on a kaiser roll, with French fries, three pickles, and a Coke.

    Fiction book (1999)

  • There's pumpernickel, challah, rye bread, and kaiser rolls.

    Ageless Love (2022)

  • He ordered corned beef on a kaiser roll, with French fries, three pickles, and a Coke.

  • Connie found Meredith standing in the bread aisle, holding a bag of kaiser rolls.

Synonyms

hard roll
vskaiser roll
1 2.1

A small round bread baked to have a hard, crisp crust

emphasizes a specific folded shape and often a seeded top
Vienna roll
vskaiser roll
5.8

A small round bread roll made with yeast and a crisp crust

is shaped from a square by folding its corners and often seeded

How Crusty

hard roll
1 2.1
kaiser roll
  • US
1 3.9

Surface Forms

kaiser roll singular
kaiser rolls plural

Morphology

kaiser + roll

The noun 'roll' clearly signals a type of bread, so a B1 learner who knows 'roll' would likely infer this is a kind of roll. However, 'kaiser' is not a transparent English word (and here is marked as absent from the learner's dictionary), so the specific form, crustiness, and traditional shaping are lexicalized cultural details that cannot be fully derived from the parts.

Etymology

Kaiser roll may come from the German word kaiser meaning 'emperor'. One popular story says a baker folded the corners of a square of dough into a round, crown-like shape to honor the ruler, so the name now means the round, crusty roll we eat today.