Cupcake

How to spell cupcake

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cupcake

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cupcake mean?

1. nounA small individual cake baked in a cup-shaped mould, usually topped with icing.

Cupcake in a sentence

• She frosted each cupcake with pale pink icing before the party.

• The bakery sells one chocolate cupcake for two pounds.

Where does cupcake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two very old everyday words, 'cup' and 'cake', joined to name a single small cake. The first element, 'cup', reached Old English as 'cuppe' from the Late Latin 'cuppa', meaning a drinking vessel, a relative of the same root behind 'cupola' and 'cupboard'. The second element, 'cake', came into English from the Old Norse 'kaka', a flat baked mass, brought over during Scandinavian settlement. The compound itself is an American coinage from the early 1800s, and there are two competing explanations for the name: that the batter was measured by the cupful rather than weighed, or that each cake was baked in a small cup-shaped tin. Either way the spelling holds no surprises, since it simply stacks the two familiar words together with no doubled letters or silent traps.

How the word is built

• cup (small drinking vessel)
• cake (sweet baked good)