Saratoga chip
A dated US term for what is now universally called a potato chip (or crisp in British English).
Etymology timeline
Born ~1853 · no dated citations yetDefinitions
A dated US term for what is now universally called a potato chip (or crisp in British English). The name comes from Saratoga Springs, New York, where the snack is said to have been invented in the 1850s by chef George Crum. The term is now obsolete in everyday use but appears in historical food writing as a direct ancestor of the modern potato chip.
The menu from the 1890s listed Saratoga chips among the side dishes, which would have been recognizable as potato chips today.
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The original name for what we now call the potato chip — thin slices of potato fried crisp and salted. According to legend, they were invented in 1853 at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York, by chef George Crum. The story goes that a fussy customer kept sending back his french fries for being too thick, so Crum sliced them paper-thin in frustration. The result was a sensation. 'Saratoga chips' remained the common name well into the 20th century before 'potato chips' took over.
The Victorian-era menu listed Saratoga chips as a side dish — basically the world's first bag of crisps.
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(US, dated) A potato chip.
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- chipped potato63%
(British) A potato chip.
- potato chip61%
(North America, Australia, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong, NZ) A potato crisp, a thin slice of potato that has been fried.
- chipped potato60%
British English for what Americans call a french fry — a piece of potato cut into strips or chunks and deep-fried. The singular chipped potato emphasises the process: chipping means cutting into pieces, and the potato is then fried. In British fish-and-chip-shop culture, chips (the plural) are a national institution, and the more formal chipped potato occasionally appears in menus, newspapers, or contexts where precision matters. Think fat, soft British chip rather than the thin crispy American fry.