gingerbread
Americannoun
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a type of cake flavored with ginger and molasses.
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a rolled cookie similarly flavored, often cut in fanciful shapes, and sometimes frosted.
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elaborate, gaudy, or superfluous architectural ornamentation.
a series of gables embellished with gingerbread.
adjective
noun
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a moist brown cake, flavoured with ginger and treacle or syrup
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a rolled biscuit, similarly flavoured, cut into various shapes and sometimes covered with icing
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( as modifier )
gingerbread man
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an elaborate but unsubstantial ornamentation
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( as modifier )
gingerbread style of architecture
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Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of gingerbread
1250–1300; Middle English gingebreed (influenced by breed bread), variant of gingebrad, -brat ginger paste < Old French gingembras, -brat preserved ginger < Medieval Latin *gingi ( m ) brātum a medicinal preparation (neuter past participle), derivative of Latin gingiber ginger
Explanation
Gingerbread is a rich, spicy cake or cookie. Some people mark the Christmas season by making gingerbread houses covered in icing and candy. The key ingredient in this delicious treat is the spice called ginger. The original meaning of the word gingerbread was "preserved ginger," and then it came to mean "ginger candy made with honey and spices." It was some time in the 15th century that what we now know as gingerbread was first invented: a rich, flavorful cookie or cake full of ginger and other spices and sweetened with molasses.
Vocabulary lists containing gingerbread
Brown
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National Cookie Day
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But in the meantime, seasonal enthusiasm for the house could be satisfied by a gingerbread facsimile thereof that was open to the public in Hollywood.
From MarketWatch ● Dec. 29, 2025
We listened to Christmas music while making gingerbread and sipping cranberry apple cider.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 23, 2025
A new festive edition of The Apprentice, which will air over two nights ahead of a full-length celebrity series next year, will see a group of stars make and market gingerbread biscuits.
From BBC ● Dec. 21, 2025
Decorations featured a giant Lego portrait of her 79-year-old husband, a huge gingerbread White House, thousands of decorative butterflies, and more than 50 Christmas trees in the first holiday season of the president's second term.
From Barron's ● Dec. 1, 2025
Miss Lilian was the snake in the garden, the witch in the gingerbread house, someone to fear even though she was dead.
From "The Old Willis Place" by Mary Downing Hahn
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
