Meaning
An extra benefit or pleasing feature on top of something already good, making a good thing better; also used ironically of a final aggravation heaped onto something already bad. Common to British and American English, with 'frosting on the cake' the usual American variant. Neutral to warm in praise, flipping to sarcastic when the extra item is one more annoyance. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Literal cake icing is old: Etymonline dates the sugary coating sense of 'ice' to 1723, 'icing' to 1769, and 'frosting' in the cake sense to about 1832. The figurative phrase is a 20th-century development: verifiable citations run from the mid-1900s, with Wiktionary's earliest quotation from Cecil J. Allen in the Railway Magazine of August 1957. A frequently repeated claim of a 1936 OED first citation for this idiom actually belongs to the related phrase 'a piece of cake', quoted from Ogden Nash's light verse that year; no verifiable 1930s use of the icing phrase itself surfaced in checking, so the figurative idiom is best described as documented from the mid-20th century while its literal base is 18th-century. Collins documents the icing and frosting alternation in present-day use.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be the icing on the cake
- cherry on top
- frosting on the cake
- the cherry on the cake
Usage Examples
- The raise was welcome, and the extra week of vacation was the icing on the cake.
- Winning the award would be icing on the cake for a season that has already exceeded expectations.
- The flight was delayed, the meal ran out, and the lost suitcase was the icing on the cake.