IdiomFood & DrinkEnglish

a piece of cake

Meaning: Something that is easy to do.

Example: “The driving test was a piece of cake.”

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Origin: Most often traced to the cakewalk, a competitive strutting dance performed at 19th-century gatherings of enslaved Black Americans, developed partly as a sly mockery of the formal ballroom manners of plantation owners; the best dancing couple won a cake as the prize, which is also where "that takes the cake" comes from. Whether "a piece of cake" for something easy descends directly from that contest is debated, since the earliest print use of the idiom itself is much later — Ogden Nash's 1936 poem Primrose Path, with the line "Her picture's in the papers now, and life's a piece of cake." A rival, less well-supported theory places the phrase in 1930s Royal Air Force slang, describing a mission so easy it was no more trouble than eating cake.

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