Skip to main content
PlainSpell

cake

/keɪk/noun, verb

cake is spelled C-A-K-E. The wrong spelling people search most is caek: about 20 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 1,667 of all searches for the word. Cake is a noun meaning “A rich, sweet dessert food, typically made of flour, sugar, and eggs and baked in an oven, and often covered…”. The plural of cake is cakes.

How many letters and syllables are in cake?

Letters4: C-A-K-E
Syllables1 (from its American pronunciation)
In writing34 times per million words; the 2,831st most frequent word form
Wrong spellings searched1; the most searched, caek, about 20 Bing searches a month (all of them)

Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).

How do you spell cake?

Cake is spelled C-A-K-E. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 1,642 of the searches for cake in either form.

cakethe right spelling32,820 searches a month
caekk and e swapped20 searches a month

Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.

How common is cake?

Cake appears 34 times per million words in written English, the 2,831st most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How do you pronounce cake?

  • /keɪk/
  • [ˈk̟ʰeɪ̯k̚]

Cake has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-cake.ogg, En-uk-cake.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of cake

  • cakes plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • caking participle, present
  • caked participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What does cake mean?

The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).

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.

  2. 2

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

    an oatmeal cake

  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

  5. 5

    slangEllipsis of piece of cake: a trivially easy task or responsibility.

  6. 6

    slangSynonym of money.

  7. 7

    Ellipsis of have one's cake and eat it too.

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

  8. 8

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

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

verb

  1. 1

    Coat (something) with a crust of solid material.

    His shoes are caked with mud.

  2. 2

    To form into a cake, or mass.

  3. 3

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

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Cake in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchgâteau, pâtisserie (type of sweet dessert), batterie d'artifice, batterie de feu d'artifice (multi-shot fireworks assembly)
GermanKuchen, Torte (type of sweet dessert), Feuerwerksbatterie (multi-shot fireworks assembly), Stück (block of dense material), verkrusten (to coat with a crust)
Portuguesebolo (type of sweet dessert), sabonete (block of dense material)
Spanishbizcocho, cake, pastel, ponqué, pudín, queque (type of sweet dessert)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does cake come from?

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).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What to look up after cake