A biscuit ( /ˈbɪskɨt/) in the United States and Canada, and widely used in popular American English, is a small bread made with baking powder or baking soda as a chemical leavening agent rather than yeast.

All biscuits have a firm browned crust and a soft interior, similar to British English scones or the bannock from the Shetland Isles.

Biscuits, soda breads, and cornbread, among others, are often referred to collectively as "quick breads," to indicate that they do not need time to rise before baking.

Although the American English and British English use the same word to refer to two distinctly different modern edible foods, early hard biscuits (North American: cookies), were derived from or as a storable version of bread.

Early European settlers in the United States brought with them a simple, easy style of cooking, most often based on ground wheat and warmed with gravy.

The biscuit emerged as a distinct food type in the early 19th century, before the American Civil War. Cooks created a cheap to produce addition for their meals that required no yeast, which was expensive and difficult to store. With no leavening agents except the bitter-tasting pearlash available, beaten biscuits were laboriously beaten and folded to incorporate air into the dough which expanded when heated in the oven causing the biscuit to rise. In eating, the advantage of the biscuit over a slice of bread was that as it was harder, and hence when wiping up gravy it kept its shape and form, creating the popular meal biscuits and gravy.

A biscuit ( /ˈbɪskɨt/) is a baked, edible, and commonly flour-based food-product. The term is used to apply to two distinctly different products in North America and the Commonwealth Nations.

The modern-day confusion in the English language around the word "biscuit" is created by its etymology.

The Middle French word bescuit is derived from the Latin words bis (twice) and coquere, coctus (to cook, cooked), and, hence, means "twice-cooked". This is because biscuits were originally cooked in a twofold process: first baked, and then dried out in a slow oven.

This term was then adapted into English in the 14th century during the Middle Ages, in the Middle English word bisquite, to represent a hard, twice-baked product.

However, the Dutch language from around 1703 had adopted the word koekje, a language diminutive of cake, to have a similar meaning for a similar hard, baked product. This may be related^{[citation needed]} to the Russian or Ukrainian translation, where "biscuit" has come to mean "sponge cake".

Bread is a staple food prepared by cooking a dough of flour and water and often additional ingredients. Doughs are usually baked, but in some cuisines breads are steamed (e.g., mantou), fried (e.g., puri), or baked on an unoiled frying pan (e.g., tortillas). It may be leavened or unleavened (e.g. matzo). Salt, fat and leavening agents such as yeast and baking soda are common ingredients, though bread may contain other ingredients, such as milk, egg, sugar, spice, fruit (such as raisins), vegetables (such as onion), nuts (such as walnuts) or seeds (such as poppy). Referred to colloquially as the "staff of life", bread has been prepared for at least 30,000 years. The development of leavened bread can probably also be traced to prehistoric times. Sometimes, the word bread refers to a sweetened loaf cake, often containing appealing ingredients like dried fruit, chocolate chips, nuts or spices, such as pumpkin bread, banana bread or gingerbread.

Fresh bread is prized for its taste, aroma, quality, appearance and texture. Retaining its freshness is important to keep it appetizing. Bread that has stiffened or dried past its prime is said to be stale. Modern bread is sometimes wrapped in paper or plastic film or stored in a container such as a breadbox to reduce drying. Bread that is kept in warm, moist environments is prone to the growth of mold. Bread kept at low temperatures, in a refrigerator for example, will develop mold growth more slowly than bread kept at room temperature, but will turn stale quickly due to retrogradation.