Covered thickly with dried or hardened material, like mud, dust, or makeup.
From the noun 'cake,' which comes from Old Norse 'kaka,' ultimately from proto-Germanic roots meaning 'to cook.' The verb form 'cake' (meaning to form into a hardened mass) emerged in the 1600s, with 'caked' as its past tense and adjectival form.
The phrase 'caked on makeup' reveals something fascinating about how English works—we borrow cake metaphors for anything that layers and hardens, which is why miners talk about 'caked coal' and geologists mention 'caked clay'! This shows how a food word becomes a universal descriptor for texture.
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