Resembling or having the texture of cake; dry, crumbly, or compacted in a solid mass.
From cake (Old Norse 'kaka') plus adjectival suffix -y. Originally described actual cakes, but the term expanded to describe any substance—wet sand, makeup, dried mud—with a similar dense, sometimes grainy texture.
Miners and geologists use 'caky' all the time to describe soil and ore—when mining conditions create a caky texture in the material, it affects how much force is needed to extract it!
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