English vocabulary: What's the difference between...

Actually it's more complicated than some of the others have suggested. (I work for an international bakery company). In the UK we have both biscuits AND cookies and they are totally different. Biscuits are dry, long shelf-life, hard products, usually industrially produced which tend to go soft as they go stale. Cookies are usually fresh-baked in the store, are soft, much higher in fat and sugar, ideally a bit squishy in the middle, only good for max 2 days and then they tend to go hard.

What you mention is the main difference even if even the texture of cookies is different from biscuits. Of course the US industrial cookies are not very different from the UK biscuits.

Yes! There are many words used to describe one substance. Just like how we define one thing in different laguages, UK English and US english can be considered as two sub-languages of English, hence, the different words. But, since people shift a lot, they adapt different words, leading to all this confusion.

As far as we know, your are right. However, living in the USA and not being from the UK, maybe my response would be wrong to those who are in or from the UK.

Biscuit in the USA is bread, like a yeast roll without the yeast, A cookie is very sweet and usually flat.

I am from England and for me I feel that the term biscuit can include things like wafers and chocolate covered shortbreads etc but I think of cookies as purely being flat and round biscuits which are usually chewy in texture.

I´m not a native English speaker either. But just as I understand people from all Snanish speaking countries, I hope I will be understood when I use the British or the Us word