Baking

How to spell baking

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baking mean?

1. nounThe activity or process of cooking bread, cakes, or pastries using dry heat in an oven.
2. adjectiveExtremely hot, as though heated in an oven.

Baking in a sentence

• noun

  She spends every Sunday morning baking bread for the week ahead.

• adjective

  The tourists crossed the baking hot car park as quickly as they could.

• noun

  The smell of fresh baking drifted out from the corner bakery.

• adjective

  By noon the construction site was baking in the relentless summer sun.

Where does baking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the verb 'bake', which descends from Old English 'bacan', meaning to cook food by surrounding it with dry heat in an oven or on hot stones. That Old English verb has deep Germanic roots and is closely related to Dutch 'bakken' and German 'backen', all pointing back to a shared ancestor meaning to roast or harden by heat. The '-ing' ending is the ordinary English suffix that turns a verb into either a present participle (the act in progress) or a verbal noun naming the activity itself. Because the silent 'e' of 'bake' is dropped before '-ing', writers occasionally hesitate over the single 'k', though English never doubles a consonant after a long vowel spelled with a final silent 'e'. The figurative sense of 'baking hot', describing oppressive heat as if one were inside an oven, has been in everyday use for well over a century.

How the word is built

• bake (from Old English bacan: to cook by dry heat)
• -ing (forming a verbal noun or present participle)