Cheesecake

How to spell cheesecake

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cheesecake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cheesecake mean?

1. nounA rich dessert made of sweetened soft cheese on a biscuit or pastry base.

Cheesecake in a sentence

• She ordered a slice of baked cheesecake with raspberry sauce.

• The recipe for vanilla cheesecake calls for cream cheese and crushed biscuits.

Where does cheesecake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cheesecake is a transparent compound of two very old everyday words. The first element, cheese, descends from the Old English ciese, which English ultimately borrowed from the Latin caseus, meaning the food made from curdled milk; the same Latin root lies behind the Italian cacio and the Spanish queso. The second element, cake, came into English from Old Norse kaka during the medieval period, originally meaning a flat baked mass of dough rather than the sweet item we picture today. The two words were joined to name a dessert of sweetened curd or soft cheese set on a base, a dish so old that versions were eaten in ancient Greece. By the twentieth century the word picked up a playful slang sense in American journalism for glamour photographs of attractive women, supposedly because such pictures were as appealing as the dessert. The spelling is mercifully regular, since both halves are common standalone words.

How the word is built

• cheese (from Old English ciese, curdled milk food)
• cake (from Old Norse kaka, baked flour mass)