Word.ws English Dictionary

hoecake

hoecake noun: a type of cornbread or cornmeal cake, made with water and salt. It was originally baked before the fire or in the ashes on a type of iron pan called a hoe; in modern times, it is fried in cooking oil in a skillet.

Noun

hoecake (plural hoecakes)

  1. (Southern US, dated) A type of cornbread or cornmeal cake, made with water and salt. It was originally baked before the fire or in the ashes on a type of iron pan called a hoe; in modern times, it is fried in cooking oil in a skillet.
    • In Jean Fritz's children's book George Washington's Breakfast, the protagonist finds out that George Washington may have eaten hoecakes for breakfast.

Forms of hoecake

pluralhoecakes

Origin of hoecake

From hoe + cake, since it was often cooked on a hoe (a type of pan, not the gardening implement).

Questions about hoecake

What does hoecake mean?
Hoecake means a type of cornbread or cornmeal cake, made with water and salt. It was originally baked before the fire or in the ashes on a type of iron pan called a hoe; in modern times, it is fried in cooking oil in a skillet.
What part of speech is hoecake?
Hoecake is a noun.
What is the plural of hoecake?
The plural of hoecake is hoecakes.

Words near hoecake in the dictionary

  1. hoe-downs
  2. hoe-farming
  3. Hoeata
  4. hoebag
  5. hoebags
  6. hoecake
  7. hoecakes
  8. Hoeck
  9. Hoecker
  10. Hoecks
  11. hoed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hoecake (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hoecake.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hoecake. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.