If someone eats an entire cake, is it correct to say that he ate just a piece of cake? Can a whole cake still be considered a piece of cake if consumed in one sitting?
Learn English – Is a whole cake still a “piece”
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If someone eats an entire cake, is it correct to say that he ate just a piece of cake? Can a whole cake still be considered a piece of cake if consumed in one sitting?
Best Answer
If you want to go by the dictionary definition, I think you will find agreement that piece is not the whole cake. In fact, thefreedictionary.com actually uses this phrase as an example of that definition of piece:
Aside from the "official" definition, intuitively I think most native English speakers would agree that "I ate a piece of cake" necessarily implies that you did not eat an entire cake, because of that additional information, "a piece of". Otherwise, you would have said "I ate a cake" or "I ate cake".
The line between piece and whole is not completely clear though; for example, if someone scoops a bit of frosting with their finger, and then you eat everything else, technically you have not eaten the whole cake — does that mean you have eaten a piece? Again, I think most people would say no, but at what point, then, does it make the transition?
I imagine if you took a large group of people, and showed people pictures of cake (a full cake, 90% of a cake, 75%, half a cake, down to a sliver of cake), you would have disagreement over when you could call it a piece of cake starting from 100% to 50%, but the smaller you got, the more you'd see it called a piece. By the time you got to 50% of the cake or less I would imagine that nearly everyone would be willing to call it a piece (but as far as I know, nobody has run this experiment).