Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A sweet baked food made of flour, liquid, eggs, and other ingredients, such as raising agents and flavorings.
  • noun A flat rounded mass of dough or batter, such as a pancake that is baked or fried.
  • noun A flat rounded mass of hashed or chopped food that is baked or fried; a patty.
  • noun A shaped or molded piece, as of soap or ice.
  • noun A layer or deposit of compacted matter.
  • intransitive verb To cover or fill with a thick layer, as of compacted matter.
  • intransitive verb To become formed into a compact or crusty mass.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A stupid fellow; a noodle.
  • noun A good thing; a dainty or delicacy, as in the phrase ‘cakes and ale’.
  • noun A rich cake glazed and filled with nuts.
  • To cackle, as geese.
  • noun A flat or comparatively thin mass of baked dough; a thin loaf of bread.
  • noun Specifically A light composition of flour, sugar, butter, and generally other ingredients, as eggs, flavoring substances, fruit, etc., baked in any form; distinctively, a flat or thin portion of dough so prepared and separately baked.
  • noun In Scotland, specifically, an oatmeal cake, rolled thin and baked hard on a griddle.
  • noun A small portion of batter fried on a griddle; a pancake or griddle-cake: as, buckwheat cakes.
  • noun Oil-cake used for feeding cattle or as a fertilizer.
  • noun Something made or concreted in the distinctive form of a cake; a mass of solid matter relatively thin and extended: as, a cake of soap.
  • To form into a cake or compact mass.
  • To concrete or become formed into a hard mass.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To form into a cake, or mass.
  • intransitive verb To concrete or consolidate into a hard mass, as dough in an oven; to coagulate.
  • intransitive verb Prov. Eng. To cackle as a goose.
  • noun A small mass of dough baked; especially, a thin loaf from unleavened dough.
  • noun A sweetened composition of flour and other ingredients, leavened or unleavened, baked in a loaf or mass of any size or shape.
  • noun A thin wafer-shaped mass of fried batter; a griddlecake or pancake; as buckwheat cakes.
  • noun A mass of matter concreted, congealed, or molded into a solid mass of any form, esp. into a form rather flat than high.
  • noun (Zoöl) any species of flat sea urchins belonging to the Clypeastroidea.
  • noun the refuse of flax seed, cotton seed, or other vegetable substance from which oil has been expressed, compacted into a solid mass, and used as food for cattle, for manure, or for other purposes.
  • noun to fail or be disappointed in what one has undertaken or expected.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb UK, dialect, obsolete, intransitive To cackle like a goose.
  • noun A rich, sweet dessert food, typically made of flour, sugar, and eggs and baked in an oven, and often covered in icing.
  • noun A block of any of various dense materials.
  • noun slang A trivially easy task or responsibility; from a piece of cake.
  • noun slang Money.
  • verb transitive Coat (something) with a crust of solid material.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a block of solid substance (such as soap or wax)
  • noun baked goods made from or based on a mixture of flour, sugar, eggs, and fat
  • noun small flat mass of chopped food
  • verb form a coat over

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old Norse kaka.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English cake, from Old Norse kaka ("cake") (compare Norwegian kake, Icelandic/Swedish kaka, Danish kage), from Proto-Germanic *kakōn (“cake”), from Proto-Indo-European *gog (“ball-shaped object”) (compare Romanian gogoașă ("doughnut") and gogă ("walnut, nut"); Lithuanian gúoge ("head of cabbage"). Related to cookie.

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Examples

Comments

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  • The cake is a lie!

    May 15, 2008

  • With proper tools, 'cake' can become a verb.

    November 18, 2009

  • OK now, I'm all for the wonderful adaptability of the English language, but that just made me wince.

    November 18, 2009

  • I don't see why. What other verb would you suggest in the sentence:

    "The soles of Camilla's riding boots were caked with mud"?

    November 18, 2009

  • A Lenin wiener? That's NOT a cake.

    November 18, 2009

  • Someone left the cake out in the rain.

    November 18, 2009

  • But I do love that Cakewrecks blog.

    November 18, 2009

  • sionnach -- not that usage, but "a lot of people cake"...

    I guess it's just similar to "a lot of people golf" vs. "a lot of people play golf" ... but still, I shuddered when I saw it first.

    November 18, 2009

  • A lot of people play cake v A lot of people cake.

    November 18, 2009

  • I'm afraid to ask what a Lenin wiener is. Is it like a Bondi bay cigar? Does "good in the Sacher torte" count as a sweet tooth fairy? Mmmm. Torte.

    "A lot of people pat a cake" versus "a lot of people play patty-cake"? Mmmm. Cake. Mmmm. Fufluns.

    It strikes me that it must be about time for our first marathon of phone umbrage-taking here on Wordnik. So, bilby, I take umbrage at the sneering tone of your last comment.

    November 18, 2009

  • Pro, pretty much any English noun can become a verb – can be verbed, as some would say illustratively – not that that's always a good thing. Please don't umbrage me for saying that.

    November 18, 2009

  • "pretty much any English noun can become a verb"

    Rolig has made what appears on the surface to be a very rash statement. I'm trying to imagine how this might work with, say, "nudibranch", "antidisestablishmentarianism", "cliometrics", or "transubstantiation". But am suffering a complete failure of the imagination.

    November 18, 2009

  • *takes some umbrage over the Lenin wiener cake*

    November 18, 2009

  • 'Would you prefer a piece of park or a walk in the cake?'

    'Mmm. That's not as easy it sounds.'

    November 18, 2009

  • Nicely,'nach! One of those mischievous false teeth fairies!

    November 18, 2009

  • Bilby, did you mean "play Cake?" I'm fond of their song "Short Skirt/Long Jacket."

    November 18, 2009

  • There's a promising level of miscommunication in this thread that gives me heart that the old Wordie spirit is not dead. It may be caked in death, tonight wearing a fashionable short skirt/long jacket, and howling over various torte-ologies, but isna nae deid.

    Don't nudibranch me, bro!

    November 18, 2009

  • The old Wordie spirit is still very much lifed.

    November 19, 2009

  • I am highly shoelaced by this conversation.

    November 24, 2009

  • "From Middle English cake, from Old Norse kaka ("cake") . . . ."

    Remind me to think twice before I call something a "piece of cake."

    December 11, 2018

  • One of the nicest Swedish deserts is a big sponge cake coated in whipped cream and studded with strawberries. In my wife’s family this is called by a name that translates to “maternal grandmother’s cake” but phonetically it is “murmur’s caca.” This give pause to those who are first introduced to it.

    December 11, 2018

  • Yum! In Latvian, the word for cake sounds a bit like "kooks."

    December 11, 2018