Word.ws English Dictionary

shoofly pie

/ʃuː.flaɪ.paɪ/

shoofly pie noun: a fluffy pie made from molasses with a crumb cake top, traditional among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

shoofly pie: a fluffy pie made from molasses with a crumb cake top, traditional among the Pennsylvania Dutch
Image: Syounan Taji, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

shoofly pie (countable and uncountable, plural shoofly pies)

  1. A fluffy pie made from molasses with a crumb cake top, traditional among the Pennsylvania Dutch.
    • Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy / Make your eyes light up / Your tummy say, "Howdy." / Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy / I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.1945, “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy”, Sammy Gallop (music)
    • “Greetings. My name is Ruby Zeldastein. I'm a medium to the other side, and I make a hell of a shoofly pie.”2013 October 6, Matt McKenna, “Poltergasm” (7:58 from the start), in American Dad!, season 10, episode 2, spoken by Roger (Seth MacFarlane)
    Synonyms:
    shoofly cake

Synonyms of shoofly pie

  • shoofly cake

Forms of shoofly pie

pluralshoofly pies
alternative formshoo-fly pie

Origin of shoofly pie

From shoo + fly + pie. Named after the Shoofly molasses company, which was named after "Shoofly the Boxing Mule" (a circus attraction of the period), which was named after a Civil-War-era folk song called "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me". Not related to the idea of shooing flies away from the sweet filling.

Questions about shoofly pie

What does shoofly pie mean?
Shoofly pie means a fluffy pie made from molasses with a crumb cake top, traditional among the Pennsylvania Dutch.
What part of speech is shoofly pie?
Shoofly pie is a noun.
How do you pronounce shoofly pie?
Shoofly pie is pronounced /ʃuː.flaɪ.paɪ/.
What is the plural of shoofly pie?
The plural of shoofly pie is shoofly pies.

Words near shoofly pie in the dictionary

  1. shooer
  2. shooers
  3. shooes off
  4. shooflies
  5. shoofly
  6. shoofly pie
  7. shoofly pies
  8. shoofti
  9. shooger
  10. shoogle
  11. shoogled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoofly pie (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.

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