Word.ws English Dictionary

vol-au-vent

UK/ˌvɒl.əʊˈvɑ̃/

vol-au-vent noun: a small circular piece of puff pastry with a hole for various fillings, such as mushrooms, prawns, fruit, cheese, etc.

vol-au-vent: a small circular piece of puff pastry with a hole for various fillings, such as mushrooms, prawns,...
Image: Roozitaa, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

vol-au-vent (plural vol-au-vent or vol-au-vents or vols-au-vent)

  1. A small circular piece of puff pastry with a hole for various fillings, such as mushrooms, prawns, fruit, cheese, etc.
    • Ray Carling: Some nicely chilled Blue Nun and some vol-au-vents? This is Manc the Knife, is it?...
      Chris Skelton: What's a vol-au-vent?...
      Ray: It's a puff pastry shell filled with a savory meat mixture...
      Chris: You mean a pie, then?2007 March 13, Ashley Pharoah, Life on Mars, Season 2, Episode 4
    • A few offered to come for me, but they’re all up to their eyes in flans and vols-au-vent and God knows what else, so I told them I’d made my own arrangements.2009, Ruth Hamilton, The Reading Room, Macmillan, →ISBN, page 342

Forms of vol-au-vent

pluralvol-au-vent
pluralvol-au-vents
pluralvols-au-vent
alternative formvol au vent

Origin of vol-au-vent

Unadapted borrowing from French vol-au-vent (“windblown”, literally “flight in the wind”).

Questions about vol-au-vent

What does vol-au-vent mean?
Vol-au-vent means a small circular piece of puff pastry with a hole for various fillings, such as mushrooms, prawns, fruit, cheese, etc.
What part of speech is vol-au-vent?
Vol-au-vent is a noun.
How do you pronounce vol-au-vent?
Vol-au-vent is pronounced /ˌvɒl.əʊˈvɑ̃/ (UK).
What is the plural of vol-au-vent?
The plural of vol-au-vent is vol-au-vent.

Words near vol-au-vent in the dictionary

  1. Vokkaligar
  2. Vokzalna
  3. vol
  4. vol au vent
  5. vol%
  6. vol-au-vent
  7. vol-au-vents
  8. vol.
  9. vola
  10. volable
  11. volador

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: vol-au-vent (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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Cite this entry: “vol-au-vent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/vol-au-vent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.