piece-of-cake
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
13 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "piece-of-cake", 13-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 "piece-of-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 "piece-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.
piece of cake is aEnglishnoun. It means: A job, task or other activity that is pleasant or, by extension, easy or simple. Pronounced /ˈpiːsə(v)ˈkeɪk/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | piece of cake |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈpiːsə(v)ˈkeɪk/ |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for piece of cake is 13 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpiːsə(v)ˈkeɪk/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for piece of cake in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: Attested since 1936, originally in American English. Possibly from cakewalk, or the notion of facility that derives from many cakes having agreeable tastes, and hence being ‘easy’ to consume. Compare French être du gâteau (literally “to be a cake”), être de… 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 piece of cake, spelled P-I-E-C-E- -O-F- -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 job, task or other activity that is pleasant or, by extension, easy or simple.
- 2Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see piece, cake.
Etymology
Attested since 1936, originally in American English. Possibly from cakewalk, or the notion of facility that derives from many cakes having agreeable tastes, and hence being ‘easy’ to consume. Compare French être du gâteau (literally “to be a cake”), être de la tarte (literally “to be a pie”), both meaning "to be easy, to be a piece of cake".
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: