That's a bowl of crisps, not a packet.

American usage is dominated by bag of chips, but British English are as likely to use packet of crisps or bag of chips. Nobody uses packet of chips much. Note that BrE chips are AmE French fries.

(The pictured snack isn't really traditional BrE "crisps" - they're made from reconstituted potato powder, with "slats" to hold more "dip, sauce" not from thin slices of whole potato.)

@FumbleFingers I have (to my shame) bought packets of 'ridge cut' smoky bacon flavour Walkers crisps (when I was working in a Civil Service office with a canteen); they looked like the ones in the picture. To me, in the UK, packet of crisps and bag of crisps are both equally valid. As you say, 'chips' are what foreigners call them. In France they are pommes chips, and guess who eat Kartoffelchips?

In the US those particular "potato chips" were introduced under the brand name "Ruffles" and the early TV commercials had the tagline "Ruffles have ridges" with the leading [r] in both words trilled in a very exaggerated manner.

Why are so many commenters averse to submitting them as reasonable answers?

@DelphicOracle Time to change your name if you've got to ask. :-)

@DelphicOracle - some 'old hands' here have an aversion to submitting fully-fledged 'answers' to what they perceive to be trivial questions which could have been easily answered by the OP doing some research. Such answers are often downvoted on our ELU sister site.

I'm not an American, but I've heard Americans say a bag of chips. Also you can say "bag of crisps" in the UK. However, I suspect most Americans will know what "packet" means. This is not only a British word. Also a packet of crisps in the UK is most commonly a small 25g serving of crisps, not a larger sized bag. Packets are generally small, and bags/packs are generally larger. This is true in both US and UK English. I suspect it's not typical for Americans to buy crisps in such small packets .

The dictionary is misleading. It quotes the common phrase packet of crisps but, as Stuart says, shows a picture of a bowl of them, presumably so that you can see them clearly!

@BillyKerr - I suspect it's not typical for Americans to buy crisps in such small packets It's increasingly the way some UK people buy them.

@MichaelHarvey, I think it's always been the most popular size, at least as long as I can remember (which is a long time). There were no giant bags of crisps when I was a child in the 70s.

@BillyKerr - You can get bags which have (let's say) 150 to 200 grams, these are often called 'sharing bags' although I think many people buy them to eat alone (we have an increasing problem with obesity and illness linked to ultra-processed foods) and also 'six packs' where the bag contains that number of normal sized packets (or bags). You do see these in 'corner shops' where someone has clearly got multipacks and opened them up, which you aren't supposed to do. They have 'not to be sold separately' on them.

@sumelic: No - your link is to what we in the UK call "kettle chips", which I'm very fond of (but they're relatively pricey). I've never seen a "serrated knife" version of those (perhaps Harrods stock them! :) But OP's picture here is Pringles or a knock-off - and they are made from dried & reconstituted potato starch. That's how they all have exactly the same saddle shape (so they fit in the tube, not the bag or packet! :)

@FumbleFingers: Pringles are certainly reconstituted potato (or reconstituted something, at any rate), but these are not Pringles - if you look closely, they're not identically shaped (though many are quite similar - I suspect they've been hand-selected by the photographer to make a good picture!). Some of them have dark bits on the edge, which are likely to be traces of potato skin.

They get very inventive with food processing these days. I don't believe for a moment that the crisps pictured were sliced from whole potatoes.

@FumbleFingers when I buy Pringles from the trolley on a Ryanair plane, the foil top bulges out interestingly, because the canister has been packed in an inert atmosphere at around sea level

@FumbleFingers I would put good money on those being "Walkers Ridge Cut" of one flavour or another.

WRT to this being a packet or not - 'packet' can be used as a dimensional quantity, i.e. "this is a packet of crisps, poured into a bowl" as opposed to say, "half a packet"

@FumbleFingers ofc, in British English a "bag of chips" is a very different thing from a "packet of crisps"

@Tristan: Yes, I said Note that BrE chips are AmE French fries in my first comment. Not exactly though - so far as I know, American "fries" are usually more like what we get in McDonalds. Nothing like the big fat flabby things we still get with lots of traditional UK fish'n'chips.

@FumbleFingers gah, sorry. I should have learnt not to comment first thing in the morning by now

@Tristan: I miss details all the time, especially soon after rising. Not helped by having the resolution on my TV-based house PC set so I can just read text (to get as much as possible on the page at once). It's dodgy underperforming eyes as well as brain for an hour or two (all day, some might say! :)

As often, your dictionary is being overly specific for the sake of being easily understandable, with the consequence of being technically wrong. Round bowls are round; most bowls are round; but not all bowls are round.

@FumbleFingers "I don't believe for a moment that the crisps pictured were sliced from whole potatoes." Here's a machine for making them from whole potatoes youtube.com/shorts/Fdm3CzszyCc .

Wait, @FumbleFingers, is your NGram suggesting that BrE today accepts chips to mean what AmE calls crisps instead of what AmE calls fries? I "a bag of chips" synonymous to "a packet of crisps" or are the items in the bag actually fries?

@terdon: No - we go along with tortilla chips (and maybe corn chips) because they came from America, and they're not made of potato. And we have potato snacks for a wide variety of (usually, highly processed) potato-based "nibbles". But traditional British potato crisps (from Walkers, etc.) are rarely if ever called "chips" by actual natives.

@FumbleFingers In the US, by law/regulation, pringles and similar products are called 'crisps'. The FTC ruled they cannot be called 'chips' in 1975. Anything labelled as a 'potato chip' in the US must be made from slices of potato. Ruffles are clearly advertised as 'potato chips' so we can close the case on that one.

@FumbleFingers "American "fries" are usually more like what we get in McDonalds. Nothing like the big fat flabby things we still get with lots of traditional UK fish'n'chips." In the US, the big flabby ones are called 'fries' but may be qualified as 'steak fries'. There are also 'home fries' which are typically roughly cube shaped. McDonald's fries are technically 'shoestring fries'.

As it stands, the title of this question and the image in its body ask for two different things. It would be nice if it were edited, since right now it's not clear at a glance which answers address the question correctly.

@FumbleFingers - re big, fat, flabby British chips - years ago I found the perfect place to get chips, a Greek-family-run traditional English café in Bedminster, Bristol. The chips were cooked in fat hot enough that they didn't go flabby, and the ends were almost needle sharp due to the way they had been cut. Just like my mother used to do them 60 years ago. Sadly, the café closed down.