Other forms: baked, baking, bakes
To bake is to cook bread, cakes or pastries in the dry heat of an oven. Bake a cake, freshly baked, bake for forty minutes.
Baking is distinguished from roasting by what is being cooked rather than by the method — you roast meat and bake bread, at the same temperature in the same oven. Baking is also unusually unforgiving of guesswork, which is why baking recipes give weights. Note baker, bakery, baking powder, baking soda; and half-baked, meaning an idea that has not been thought through.
1verbbakeTo cook bread or cakes in the dry heat of an oven.
“She bakes her own bread every weekend.”
Patternbake + noun (bread, a cake, biscuits) · bake for + time · freshly baked · a baker / bakery · a bake sale
2verbbecomeTo become very hot, of weather or a place.
“The whole yard bakes from about eleven onwards.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
bake is a way of cooking.
BAKE → what the BAKEr does all night
A baker is somebody who bakes: the bread goes into the oven soft and white and comes out hard and brown.
hooks ontobaker
Old English bacan is Germanic and related to Greek phogein, to roast. The word has meant the same thing for well over a thousand years, which is unusual and probably says something about how little the process has changed.
Middle English
baken
English, today
bake
From Middle English baken. From Middle English baken, from Old English bacan (“to bake”), from Proto-West Germanic bakan, from Proto-Germanic bakaną (“to bake”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰeh₃g- (“to roast, bake”). Cognate with West Frisian bakke (“to bake”), Dutch bakken (“to bake”), Low German backen (“to bake”), German backen (“to bake”), Norwegian Bokmål bake (“to bake”), Danish bage (“to bake”), Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish baka (“to bake”), Ancient Greek φώγω (“roast”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA