Word.ws English Dictionary

parfait

UK/ˈpɑːfeɪ//ˈpɑɹfeɪ/

parfait noun: a French parfait (parfait glacé), an iced dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, cream, and flavouring (usually fruit), sometimes with the addition of a liqueur.

parfait: a French parfait (parfait glacé), an iced dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, cream, and flavouring...
Image: pinguino, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

parfait (countable and uncountable, plural parfaits)

  1. A French parfait (parfait glacé), an iced dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, cream, and flavouring (usually fruit), sometimes with the addition of a liqueur.
    • Brad hesitated, peering at the grid of spun sugar that jutted from his loganberry parfait.2004, Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 379
  2. An American parfait, a layered dessert often consisting of fruit, ice cream, pastries, whipped topping, etc. and served in a glass, often a parfait glass.
    • It was a parfait of puréed avocados, whipped cream, sugar and vanilla, which had been molded into a rectangle atop a peanut-butter crust and then bedecked with tiny wild strawberries. […] We were utterly transfixed, and we were quickly out of parfait.2005 August 19, Frank Bruni, “Compass”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 29 May 2015
  3. (UK) A smooth pâté, usually made from liver and flavoured with liqueurs.

Proper noun capitalized: Parfait

Parfait (plural Parfaits)

  1. A surname from French [in turn transferred from the nickname].

parfait meaning in Marathi and Indonesian

parfait in Marathi

an iced dessert
पार्फे pārphe

parfait in Indonesian

an iced dessert
parfe, parfait

Forms of parfait

Noun
pluralparfaits
Proper noun
pluralParfaits

Origin of parfait

Unadapted borrowing from French parfait (“perfect”). Doublet of parfit, perfect, perfecto, and perfectus.

Words formed from parfait

Phrases with parfait

Questions about parfait

What does parfait mean?
Parfait means a French parfait (parfait glacé), an iced dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, cream, and flavouring (usually fruit), sometimes with the addition of a liqueur.
What is parfait in Marathi?
Parfait in Marathi is पार्फे (pārphe). See Parfait meaning in Marathi.
What part of speech is parfait?
Parfait can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce parfait?
Parfait is pronounced /ˈpɑːfeɪ/ (UK).
What is the plural of parfait?
The plural of parfait is parfaits.

Words near parfait in the dictionary

  1. pareunia
  2. pareus
  3. parev
  4. pareve
  5. parevine
  6. parfait
  7. parfait amour
  8. parfait d'amour
  9. parfait spoon
  10. parfait spoons
  11. parfaits

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: parfait (page history and authors); Parfait (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-parfait.wav.

Cite this entry: “parfait.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/parfait. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.