Baked

How to spell baked

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce baked

What does baked mean?

1. verbCooked using dry heat in an oven, as the past tense or past participle of 'bake'.
2. adjectiveCooked or hardened by dry heat, used to describe a food or substance.

Baked in a sentence

• verb

  She baked a loaf of sourdough for the weekend.

• adjective

  The menu listed baked potatoes with sour cream.

• verb

  The casserole baked slowly for two hours.

• adjective

  The desert floor was as hard as baked clay.

Where does baked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'bake', which descends from Old English 'bacan', meaning to cook food by surrounding it with dry heat in an oven or over coals. The Old English verb has solid Germanic roots, with close relatives in Old High German 'bahhan' and Old Norse 'baka', all tracing back to an ancient root meaning to warm or to roast. The same family gives us the noun 'batch', originally the quantity of bread baked at one time. The spelling 'baked' is regular and transparent: it simply adds the -ed ending, and the silent 'e' of 'bake' is kept before that ending in writing even though it is not pronounced. Because the word follows the standard pattern so neatly, it has stayed easy to spell for as long as it has been written.

How the word is built

• bake (Old English bacan: to cook by dry heat)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)