Englishsell like hotcakes
Meaning: To sell quickly.
Example: “The umbrellas sold like hotcakes during the rainy week.”
Origin: Hotcakes are griddle cakes — pancakes — and the phrase comes out of the American fairground and church-social circuit of the early 1800s, where they were cooked fresh on a griddle and sold to the crowd on the spot. Their whole appeal depended on being eaten hot, straight off the pan, which meant a seller could rarely cook fast enough to keep up with the line waiting in front of the griddle; a batch disappeared almost as quickly as it could be made. The earliest recorded uses run "to go like hot cakes" rather than "sell like," and the comparison was already doing figurative work by around 1839, applied to anything moving off a counter faster than it could be restocked.
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