To win; to top them all. This reference to a cake as a prize today is often used ironically, as in O. Henry’s “You Yankees assuredly take the cake for assurance” (Helping the Other Fellow, 1908). Apparently this was not always so, for the ancient Greeks awarded a cake to the person who best stayed awake during an all-night party. However, they then transferred the expression to any kind of prize-winning feat; the playwright Aristophanes wrote, “In all craftiness we take the cake” (the Thesmophoriazusae, translated as The Women at Demeter’s Festival, 411 b.c.). The term was revived in late-nineteenth-century America, and many etymologists believe that, rather than referring to the ancient practice, it alluded to the then popular African-American contest called the “cake walk,” in which couples walked around and around a cake that was then awarded to the couple judged to be the most graceful. See also piece of cake.