Other forms: gingerbreads
Gingerbread is a spiced cake or biscuit flavoured with ginger. A gingerbread man.
It keeps for weeks and even improves, which is why it was a fair and festival food. Gingerbread also names the fussy wooden ornament on Victorian houses.
1noungingerbreadA spiced cake or biscuit flavoured with ginger.
“The gingerbread was better after a week in the tin.”
gingerbread is a food.
Middle English gyngebred first meant preserved ginger, from Old French gingembras, and the bread came in later by confusion.
Ancient Greek
ζιγγίβερις
Latin
zingiber — ginger
Medieval Latin
*gingimbrātus — gingered
Old French
gingembras
Middle English
gyngebred
English, today
gingerbread
Built from
From Middle English gyngebred, gyngebrede, from Old French gingembras, gingimbrat (“preserved ginger”), from Medieval Latin gingimbrātus (“gingered”), with the intrusive m added to gingiber, from Latin zingiber (“ginger”), of earlier Sanskrit - origin, through Ancient Greek ζιγγίβερις. The third syllable was earlier confounded with bread, and the insertion of an r in the second syllable completed the semblance of a compound word: ginger + bread.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA