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cake

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //keɪk//
  • /[ˈk̟ʰeɪ̯k̚]/

A rich, sweet dessert food, typically made of flour, sugar, and eggs and baked in an oven, and often covered in icing.

noun

  1. 1

    A rich, sweet dessert food, typically made of flour, sugar, and eggs and baked in an oven, and often covered in icing.

    On Monday afternoon, Ronya attends a birthday party and eats cake whenever cake is presented to her.

  2. 2

    A small mass of baked dough, especially a thin loaf from unleavened dough.

    an oatmeal cake

    a johnnycake

  3. 3

    A thin wafer-shaped mass of fried batter; a griddlecake or pancake.

    buckwheat cakes

  4. 4

    A block of any various dense materials.

    a cake of soap

    a cake of sand

    Cakes of rustling ice come rolling down the flood.

  5. 5

    slangSynonym of money.

  6. 6

    slangSynonym of buttocks, especially a pair that are exceptionally plump or full.

    Since I started doing squats, I've built up some serious cake.

  7. 7

    A multishot fireworks assembly comprising several tubes, each with a fireworks effect, lit by a single fuse.

  8. 8

    figurativeSynonym of pie, the whole of a wealth or resource, to be divided into parts.

    I am aware of the efforts made to contest the relevance of these statistics... But you cannot get away from the fact that a low gdp means a smaller national cake and that there is less wealth to go round.

  9. 9

    obsoleteA foolish person.

    "The Lord Mayor can say tart things," said Hobler to a scavenger. "Yes," replied the dustman, "he does say things that are tart, which is not to be wondered at when we know him to be a regular cake."

  10. 10

    Variant of piece of cakeslangEllipsis of piece of cake: a trivially easy task or responsibility.

    Now that I escape, sleepwalk awake / Those who could relate know the world ain't cake

  11. 11

    Variant of have one's cake and eat it tooEllipsis of have one's cake and eat it too.

    "It looks like the cake philosophy is still alive." Quote attributed to Donald Tusk.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Germanic *kakǭ Old Norse kakabor. Middle English cake English cake From Middle English cake, from Old Norse kaka (“cake”) (compare Norwegian kake, Icelandic/Swedish kaka, Danish kage), from Proto-Germanic *kakǭ, of disputed origin. Likely a distant cognate with kaak. Perhaps related to cookie, kuchen, and quiche. Doublet of coca (pastry).

verb

  1. 1

    Coat (something) with a crust of solid material.

    His shoes are caked with mud.

    You will remember that Stranger Things was initially conceived as a one-off, and its success forced the Duffer Brothers to cake on endless new lore to keep the engine running.

  2. 2

    To form into a cake, or mass.

  3. 3

    Of blood or other liquid, to dry out and become hard.

    Once we fell asleep, and, I think, must have slept for some hours, for, when we woke, our limbs were quite stiff, and the blood from our blows and scratches had caked, and was hard and dry upon our skin.

Forms

plural
cakes
past tense
caked
past participle
caked
present participle
caking
third person singular
cakes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).