Cake

How to spell cake

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cake

What does cake mean?

1. nounA sweet baked food made from a mixture of flour, sugar, eggs, and fat.
2. nounA shaped or compacted block of a solid substance.

Cake in a sentence

• She baked a chocolate cake for the birthday party.

• He placed a fresh cake of soap by the bathroom sink.

• A slice of cake was served with afternoon tea.

• The workshop used a small cake of wax to seal the joints.

Where does cake come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Cake came into English from Old Norse kaka, a word meaning a flat baked mass of dough, and it appeared in the language in the early 1200s during the long period of Scandinavian influence on northern English. The original sense was much broader and plainer than ours: a cake was simply a small, flattish loaf or bun, often unsweetened, baked hard on both sides. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed and sweetened, so that by the time of modern baking a cake meant the rich, sugared confection we picture today. The same root survives in related Germanic words such as the Dutch koek and German Kuchen, both meaning a baked cake. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the silent final 'e' doing its familiar job of lengthening the vowel, which is why cake gives almost no trouble to adult writers.

How the word is built

• cake (single root, from Old Norse kaka: a baked sweet mass)