bake

Meanings

1. To cook food, especially bread or cakes, using dry heat in an oven.
2. To become very hot and dry from the sun.

Example sentences

• "We bake bread every Saturday morning."

  Level A1, Meaning 1

• "She baked a chocolate cake for his birthday."

  Level A1, Meaning 1

• "The sun baked the dry ground."

  Level B1, Meaning 2

• "Bake the potatoes for forty minutes."

  Level A2, Meaning 1

Look-alikes and common mistakes

• roast : Roast is for meat and vegetables cooked in an oven. Bake is more often for bread, cakes and pastry.
• fry : Fry cooks food in hot oil in a pan. Bake uses dry heat inside an oven.

Word family and forms

Forms: bakes, baked, baking

Word partners

Words and phrases that often go with "bake".

• bake a cake
• bake bread
• baked potatoes
• bake for an hour
• a bake sale
• freshly baked

Idioms and phrases

half-baked

Not well planned or thought out.

"It was a half-baked idea and it did not work."

Origin

Bake comes from Old English bacan, an old Germanic verb related to Dutch bakken and German backen. It may also be related to the Greek word phogein, to roast. English has had the word since before the year 1000.

Checked against: Wiktionary, the free dictionary, Dictionary.com.

How to remember it

Bake and cake rhyme. You bake a cake.

Test yourself

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