cake

«cake» in Mova's school dictionary: a sweet baked food made of flour, eggs, sugar and butter… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (cake, cakes); verb (cake, caked — covered thickly)

meaning for a pupil

1) A cake is a sweet baked food made of flour, eggs, sugar and butter, often for birthdays and parties. tree →

2) A cake can be a flat round piece of other food: a fish cake. tree →

3) To be caked in mud is to be thickly covered in it. tree →

sense in the lessons

a thing counted, made and sold by a baker, or cut into equal pieces; cakes are good for fractions: half a cake, a quarter of a cake; phrases: «a piece of cake» (very easy), «birthday cake», «bake a cake», «cupcake»

examples

• The baker made 110 cakes. tree →
• He sold 75 cakes. tree →
• A cake is cut into 8 pieces. tree →
• How many more cakes than pastries did he sell? tree →
• We baked a chocolate cake for Dad. tree →
• Can I have a piece of cake? tree →
• The test was a piece of cake. tree →
• His boots were caked in mud. tree →
• The cakes were smoking on the hearth. tree →

note

Countable (a cake, cakes) and uncountable (some cake). A thing counted. «made» adds, «sold» or «ate» takes away; «cut into N pieces» makes equal parts. Trap: cakes and pastries are counted apart. «a piece of cake» can mean «very easy».

In the corpora

• Cakes rise with baking powder or whisked eggs instead.
• Cakes rise without yeast, using baking powder or whisked eggs to trap gas that expands in the oven heat.
• Wild guesses with no link to the text, like a dragon turning into a cake for no reason, are not good predictions.
• In the active voice the subject does the action: "The dog ate the cake."
• In the passive voice the subject receives the action: "The cake was eaten by the dog."

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «cake» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.