cake
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "cake", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "cake" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "cake" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cake is aEnglishnoun. It means: A rich, sweet dessert food, typically made of flour, sugar, and eggs and baked in an oven, and often covered in icing. Pronounced /keɪk/. It ranks #2,822 in English word frequency. Often confused with CE and can.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cake |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /keɪk/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,822 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cake is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /keɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,822 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for cake, with forms such as "acke", "caek", and "cakke". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "CE", "can", "car", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: 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. Like… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is cake, spelled C-A-K-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A rich, sweet dessert food, typically made of flour, sugar, and eggs and baked in an oven, and often covered in icing.
- 2A small mass of baked dough, especially a thin loaf from unleavened dough.
- 3A thin wafer-shaped mass of fried batter; a griddlecake or pancake.
- 4A block of any various dense materials.
- 5Ellipsis of piece of cake: a trivially easy task or responsibility.
- 6Money.
- 7Used to describe the doctrine of having one's cake and eating it too.
- 8A pair of buttocks, especially one that is exceptionally plump or full.
- 9A multishot fireworks assembly comprising several tubes, each with a fireworks effect, lit by a single fuse.
- 10A foolish person.
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).
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acke,caek,cakke,ccake,ckae
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for cake
Misspelling Variants of "cake"
Frequency rank: #2,822 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: