Word.ws English Dictionary

like hot cakes

like hot cakes prepositional phrase: synonym of quickly, especially in the context of sales or consumption.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (colloquial) Synonym of quickly, especially in the context of sales or consumption.
    • These new toys should go like hot cakes.
    Synonyms:
    quickly

Synonyms of like hot cakes

Origin of like hot cakes

Used with various other verbs in the manner of the original idiom sell like hot cakes, after the proverbial popularity of pancakes in 19th-century America.

Questions about like hot cakes

What does like hot cakes mean?
Like hot cakes means synonym of quickly, especially in the context of sales or consumption.
What part of speech is like hot cakes?
Like hot cakes is a prepositional phrase.

Words near like hot cakes in the dictionary

  1. like grease through a goose
  2. like grim death
  3. like heck
  4. like hell
  5. like hey-go-mad
  6. like hot cakes
  7. like I care
  8. like I cared
  9. like it or leave it
  10. like it or lump it
  11. like it or not

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: like hot cakes (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-like hot cakes.ogg.

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