In British English, biscuit covers the small, crisp baked snack Americans call a cookie, while American biscuit means something closer to a soft, flaky scone. A simple memory hook: British biscuit dunks in tea, American biscuit sits next to gravy.
The core difference
Biscuit and cookie largely mean the same crisp baked snack, but which word (and which meaning of biscuit) applies depends on British versus American English.
- biscuit — a small, flat baked snack, crisp in British usage or soft and flaky in American usage: She dunked a chocolate biscuit into her tea.
- cookie — chiefly American term for a small, flat, sweet baked treat: He grabbed a chocolate chip cookie from the jar.
How to tell them apart
The confusion runs both ways across the Atlantic. In Britain, biscuit is the everyday word for what Americans call a cookie — a small, crisp, sweet snack meant for dunking in tea. In American English, though, a biscuit is a soft, flaky bread roll, closer to what the British would call a scone, and it turns up beside gravy rather than in a biscuit tin.
Cookie has a second life entirely outside the kitchen: it is also the small piece of data a website stores on a visitor's device, a sense biscuit does not share.
