What does the term cakewalk mean

To perform a strutting dance. An elaborate step or walk formerly performed by blacks in the South competing for the prize of a cake. A strutting dance developed from this. Something easily accomplished, won, etc. To do a cakewalk. Origin of cakewalk. The cakewalk dance, a highlight of the show, became the rage of the town.

Hokum also encompassed dances like the cakewalk and the buzzard lope in skits that unfolded through spoken narrative and song.

The role of a mentally challenged person is no cakewalk , but the actor takes to it like a fish takes to water. The music includes marches, cakewalks, gospel and ragtime and the production is mostly sung-through. The third part had a cakewalk jubilee, a military drill and a chorus march.

The difficulty curve was labelled inconsistent, with cakewalk levels being followed immediately by nearly impossible ones. Emma refuses to dance the cakewalk with him, even though they are favoured to win the competition. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web.

Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. What is the pronunciation of cakewalk? Browse cakeage. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. In Paris the cakewalk is a thing of misunderstood, misapplied accents. He tipped his derby one-sided and started off on a cakewalk. New Word List Word List.

Save This Word! See synonyms for cakewalk on Thesaurus. Or does it? Historians generally believe these contests originated in the antebellum slave quarters of Southern plantations, according to a paper by Brooke Baldwin in the Journal of Social History. The interviews were transcribed in what would now be considered heavy-handed dialect, with inconsistent punctuation.

De couple dat danced best got a prize. In , for example, Shepard Edmonds, a musical figure from the ragtime era, recounted this description of cakewalks from his parents, who had been slaves:. We had a good laugh over our cake walk. Oxford cites several other examples, including this one from Americanisms Old and New , an dictionary of colloquialisms and other usages, by John Stephen Farmer:.

It is a walking contest, not in the matter of speed, but in style and elegance.