Bake

How to spell bake

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bake

What does bake mean?

1. verbTo cook food using dry heat, typically in an oven.
2. nounA social gathering or meal centred on baked or roasted food.

Bake in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to bake fresh bread every weekend.

• noun

  The fire department's annual lobster bake drew a large crowd to the beach.

• verb

  The recipe says to bake the cake for forty minutes.

• noun

  Their annual clam bake on the beach draws the whole family.

Where does bake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English verb bacan, which already meant exactly what it means today: to cook food by dry heat, especially in an oven. It belongs to a wide family of related words across the Germanic languages, including the Old Norse baka, the Dutch bakken, and the German backen, all carrying the same idea of cooking with heat. Scholars trace the whole group back to a prehistoric root meaning 'to warm' or 'to roast', which neatly links the kitchen sense to the gentle warmth of an oven. The noun 'baker', meaning one whose trade is baking, is recorded from very early on, and the place where they worked gave us 'bakery'. Because the word is so old and so plainly spelled, it has kept a simple, regular form and rarely troubles a writer.

How the word is built

• bake (from Old English bacan: to cook by dry heat); single native root, no affixes