Cookies are, in English usage, large, semi-soft, sweet biscuits, often as large as 5ins diameter. By contrast biscuits are small, almost always crisp and near-flat. In North America the term 'cookie' is used for what in England is a 'biscuit', while the word 'biscuit' is used there for, I don't really know what, but possibly some sort of dry scone. The word 'cracker' for a crisp savoury is used on both sides of the Atlantic, but in England a cracker is definitively a class of biscuit.
Biscuits
North American (left) English (Right) - in this case a Bourbon Biscuit
Image: Lou Sander
The word 'cookie' seems to be from the Dutch 'koekje' a diminutive of koek, and turns up first in Scotland in the 1750's as a word for plain bread bun, from which it was adapted to the modern usage, as in the wonderful line from Scott's 'Antiquary', "Mickle obliged to ye for your cookies, Mrs. Shortcake." 'Biscuit', on the other hand, is defined in the OED as "A kind of crisp dry bread more or less hard, prepared generally in thin flat cakes. The essential ingredients are flour and water, or milk, without leaven; but confectionery and fancy biscuits are very variously composed and flavoured." It seems to be of very old use, first known in Mannyng's Chronicle of about 1338; "Armour žei had plente, & god besquite to mete."
Cookies are also little notes left on your computer by websites to remember what you did when you last visited. Someone in Brussels has got in a tizzy about them, and thinks sites should know if you want cookies or not. Trouble is, the only way a site can know not to leave cookies is by leaving a cookie saying 'don't leave cookies here'. Our policy is to ignore the whole thing and wait till it just goes away.
Some, just some, of the pages mentioning Biscuits in Foods of England are:
