bake

Formsbakes, baking, baked

Pluralbakes

1. 1
   verbtransitive or intransitive

   To cook something in an oven, often for another person.

   Every morning the shop bakes fresh loaves for the neighborhood.

   They bake together whenever the grandchildren visit.

   Note

   The core kitchen sense, from Old English bacan and an Indo-European root meaning "to roast, bake." It fits every pattern. You can simply bake, bake a pie, or bake someone a cake, and in the last pattern the person served comes before the dish. Some dialects keep an old past form, book, where standard English says baked.

2. 2
   verbintransitive

   To become cooked through exposure to the dry heat of an oven.

   The pie needs to bake for forty minutes.

   Muffins bake more quickly than dense loaves.

   Similarcook

   Note

   Here the cake, not the cook, is the subject: the cake baked at 350°F. The verb that takes a person in the cooking-something sense turns around to describe what happens inside the oven, so a recipe can say "let it bake" without naming anyone. It pairs naturally with a time or temperature instead of an object.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   The activity of cooking food in an oven.

   The weekly bake produced dozens of loaves for the market.

   After a long bake, the kitchen smelled of fresh bread.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A food item produced by baking, such as a pastry or other oven-cooked treat.

   The café displays its bakes in a glass case each morning.

   He picked the largest bake on the counter.

   Note

   The countable noun for anything that comes out of the oven. Annie Rigg's Great British Bake Off: Children's Party Cakes & Bakes (2016) pairs it with cakes in its title, and it often appears in the plural as a general term. It can also name a single local favorite, as when the Inverness Press and Journal wrote in 2024 of a lard-rich "beloved bake."

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To dry something out by exposing it to strong heat.

   Weeks of drought baked the fields into cracked, dusty ground.

   Potters bake the molded clay to remove every trace of moisture.

   Similarparch, scorch, dry, fire

6. 6
   verbfigurativelyintransitive

   To feel oppressively hot, as if cooking in the surrounding heat.

   We baked in the stadium under the midday sun.

   Commuters bake on the platform whenever the air conditioning fails.

   Similarswelter, roast, boil, fry

   Oppositefreeze

   Note

   Weather talk puts it in an impersonal pattern: it is baking in the greenhouse. A person can be the subject too, as in I'm baking after that workout, and then it describes how hot someone feels, not how hot a place is. The progressive suits it well, giving a sense of heat that goes on and on.

7. 7
   nounUScountable

   A social gathering where food, often seafood, is baked, or where baked food is served.

   The annual lobster bake drew the whole town down to the shore.

   They organized a community bake to raise money for the school.

   Note

   An American word for the whole occasion, not just the dish. A fish bake, shrimp bake or lobster bake is a gathering, often in the open air, with the food named first just as in the casserole-like dish. The 1904 Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology already uses "a fish bake" as a familiar comparison for a fire made in a shallow pit.

8. 8
   nounAustraliaNew ZealandUKcountable

   An oven-cooked dish of combined ingredients, similar to a casserole.

   She served a creamy pasta bake to the hungry guests.

   A tuna bake makes an easy weeknight meal for the family.

   Similarcasserole

   Note

   A dish named by its main ingredient followed by bake: pasta bake, fish bake, potato bake. The pattern is especially at home in British, Australian and New Zealand kitchens, where the word covers much of the ground of casserole. It works as an ordinary countable noun (a pasta bake, two tuna bakes), always with the ingredient first.

9. 9
   verbfigurativelytransitive

   To make something hot, as if cooking it with intense heat.

   The relentless sun baked the clay courts into a hard crust.

   Engine heat can bake the components nearest the manifold.

   Similarscorch, parch, heat, sear

10. 10
    verbfigurativelytransitive

    To make something a fixed, built-in part of a larger system or whole.

    Like a thread woven through fabric: it becomes inseparable from the whole.

    The designers baked accessibility into the app from the very start.

    Companies that bake ethics into their culture tend to keep employees longer.

    Similarbuild, embed, incorporate, integrate

    Note

    The figurative sense comes with in or into, and it has settled into an idiom: baked into the cake. The phrase describes something so built in that it cannot be removed, as in "baked into the cake of American politics." The image is of an ingredient that cannot be taken back out once the cake is done. Writers apply it to mergers, unions and government alike.

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