I've settled into Twitter by attempting a "Difference of the Day" each day, as well as passing on other (BrE) titbits/(AmE) tidbits of possible dialectal and cross-cultural interest.  There's only so much you can do in 140 characters, so most of the "differences" are over-simplified, as my Twitter followers and Facebook friends are happy to point out.  Yesterday's tweet inspired a fair amount of fine-tuning by readers.  It went:

In hono(u)r of Friday night, the Difference of the Day is AmE take-out (noun) and to-go (adj/adv) vs. BrE take-away.

Let's start with the BrE one.  Take-away is extremely flexible, both grammatically and semantically.  It can be:

A noun for the food that's been taken away:  We had a Chinese take-away.
A noun for a place that only sells prepared food to eat off-site: We went to the Chinese take-away.
An adjective for such food or place: a take-away pizza
A phrasal verb: Is that to eat here (or eat in) or take away?

On the last point: it's not really a full-fledged verb. You never hear anyone say We took out or We took out a pizza (or even worse, We took out a Chinese).  It's used mainly in the infinitive and mainly in the process of making or receiving a food order.  After the fact, you'd say We got a take-away, or some such thing.

A couple of readers pointed out that in Scottish English it would be carry-out (with the same grammatical range) rather than take-away.  I'll still call take-away BrE rather than just English English since (a) it's certainly spread that far, even if it's not the native term; there are businesses that call themselves take-aways in Edinburgh and Glasgow (though probably more that call themselves carry-outs, it's true) and (b) 'non-Scottish' doesn't necessarily mean 'English'--there are other parts of the UK too.  On point (a), there are over a million hits for each of take-away+Edinburgh and carry-out+Edinburgh, and the Glaswegian equivalents--in fact, one of the first hits is www.glasgowtakeaways.co.uk.

Damien Hall wrote to say:

I haven't checked this, but I think I've heard that this is a demonstration of a classic dialectological phenomenon, two varieties with an intermediate transition zone in between: so Southern English take-away, Scots carry-out, and I think some bits of Northern English say take-out.

Damien has remembered correctly.  I found this quotation in "The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations" by Frans Hinskens, Peter Auer, and Paul Kerswill (in their edited collection Dialect Change, Cambridge University Press, 2005):

Whenever dialect mixing leads to the stabilisation of the variants that are typical of the respective ‘pure’ lects along with additional ‘compromise’ variants, one usually speaks of fudging (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 110–118; Britain 2002, 2004). [...] a similar, more recent, example from British English, discussed by Trudgill, concerns central and southern take away, the northern variant carry out, and the intermediate take out, which is used in the southern part of northern England.

Incidentally, if you're getting fish and (BrE) chips, you generally don't need to mention that it's take-away.  As we say in Linguistics, fish and chips are unmarked for taking-away--it's far less usual to have your fish and chips in a restaurant. A (BrE) fish-and-chip shop is perhaps the archetype of British take-away establishments, and they most often don't have seating for eating-in.

On to the American: take-out does not have quite the range that take-away does, since it shares the work with to-go (which we have discussed a little bit already).  A friend pointed out that he'd say carry-out for pizza or Italian food.  And you know what?  So would I.   I'm not sure why this is--it doesn't seem to be particularly regional, since my friend is from California, living in Illinois, and I'm from New York state.

The noun take-out has a very New York City feel to me, but that's probably just because I grew up in a part of the state that didn't really have take-out establishments (fast food, yes; Chinese restaurants, no) in my long-ago (1970s/80s) youth.  The fast-food places would ask if you wanted your food for here or to go.  (Indeed, I had to ask that myself during my two stints of McDonald's purgatory-on-Earth.)  The pizza places ask if you want it for carry-out (or also pick-up) or delivery.   For me in my youth, getting a take-out was what people on television did--though getting carry-out pizza was a regular treat for us.

A completely non-linguistic aside: it can be funny to reali{s/z}e how atypical one's everyday foods can be.  For me, pizza is the food of childhood (perhaps it wasn't so in other parts of the US way back then--I'm not sure. The northeast has had plenty of Italian immigration.)   Better Half was introduced to pizza when he was about 13 at Pizzaland, where they served up a half a pizza with a (BrE) jacket potato/(AmE) baked potato and cole slaw.  I still get the giggles whenever he mentions it.  (His sister's mother-in-law made it into her 70s without ever having had pasta.  She was not impressed when Sister-in-Law introduced her to it.)  I also find it funny that some English people say to me that they couldn't eat pizza often.  I reply: but you have sandwiches every day--what's the difference? It's another way of having bread with cheese, meat or veg and condiments.  (It becomes clear in most cases that we're never going to see eye-to-eye on this.  But as a conciliatory point, I really like British pizza--which is more like what one gets in northern Italy. Thin, olive-oily crusts and top-rate toppings.)

On the other hand, a few English people have asked me how curry here compares to Indian food in the US, and I have to explain that I never had Indian food until I moved to South Africa in my mid-20s--and that I have never lived in an American town that had an Indian restaurant (though some of the towns have changed by now--though their Indian places are generally fairly fancy, not the kinds of places you'd get a take-away/take-out curry from).  I still haven't acquired the British native's facility with an Indian menu. I can tell you that I like dupiazas (or dopiazas), that chicken tikka masala is supposedly the national dish of the UK and that kurmas (or kormas) are for (orig. AmE) wimps.  Other than that, I have to read all the fine print on the menus.  Here's a cheat-sheet if, like me, you need one...

Regular reader/commenter John Cowan wrote a few weeks ago to ask:

Would you consider polling your readership for their pronunciation of aberrant?  The OED2 gives only penultimate stress (the OED3 hasn't reached the word yet); m-w.com gives both initial and penultimate stress. My sense is that initial stress is far more common, partly because I've only heard that, and partly because of the frequent misspelling "abberant", which would be regular for initial stress.  But there may be an AmE/BrE factor at work here.

Unlike John, I only really know the penultimate stress version (aBERrant rather than ABerrant).  Just to prove me exceptional (doesn't that sound better than wrong?), my mother has just pronounced it with first-syllable stress.  On other recent occasions, I've heard the ABerrant pronunciation and assumed it to be from someone who's less than familiar with the word.  I know it, and have feelings about it, because  I had to learn for vocabulary quizzes in (AmE) 9th grade.  Last week I went to the funeral of the teacher who made me so judg(e)mental about other people's pronunciations.  Rest in peace, Mrs(.) Biddle!

I was interested to read the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel's take on the matter:

Traditionally aberrant has been pronounced with stress on the second syllable. In recent years, however, a pronunciation with stress on the first syllable has become equally common and may eventually supplant the older pronunciation. This change is owing perhaps to the influence of the words aberration and aberrated, which are stressed on the first syllable. The Usage Panel was divided almost evenly on the subject: 45 percent preferred the older pronunciation and 50 percent preferred the newer one. The remaining 5 percent of the Panelists said they use both pronunciations. 

 So, that's America.  What about the UK?  The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation offers the older pronunciation only--but the fact that the word has made it into the guide probably indicates some insecurity about how it should be pronounced.  John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary lists both (older first) with no comment.  He's graciously responded to my email on the topic, saying:

Our stress rules for Latin and Greek words give stress on the -err- because of the geminated consonant (i.e. double in Latin and in spelling). Compare "venerate" with single r. So penultimate stress is what we expect, and the only form given in the OED.  However I have heard initial stress occasionally. I have no statistics on how widespread this might be.

So, what do you say (if you say it)?  Please remember to say where you're from when you answer!

Frequent contributor Marc wrote to say that he:

received this comment about a draft letter I prepared:

"Can you please put in I AM WRITING TO YOU NOT I AM WRITING YOU..this is amercian and bad english."

Comment is from an England-born Australian.

I am willing to admit that this may be American English (and the letter is on behalf of an organization that is supposed to use "international" (i.e., British) English. But it's certainly not "bad English", is it? (And I do find it easier accepting criticism on my English that is spelled and capitalized properly... but that's another issue.)

If there is a difference between UK and US English on this, does it apply to other verbs, such as "send"?

Well, as long as people are being judg(e)mental about others' language here, I'll say that it's Rude English (RdE) to claim that someone else's dialect is 'bad English'. Let's see what Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd edition) has to say about write:

The transitive AmE use = 'to communicate with (a person) in writing' is shown in the following examples from short stories in the New Yorker. I had written my mother about all this (1987); Liza, my dear, I have never written you yet to thank you for going out to our house (1993). This construction was formerly standard in BrE ('frequent from c 1790' says the OED), but it is now in restricted use unless accompanied by a second (direct) object, as in I shall write you a letter as soon as I land in Borneo. In old-fashioned commercial correspondence the types We wrote you yesterday; Please write us at your convenience were often used, but nowadays to would normally be inserted before you and us.

Meanwhile, John Algeo's British or American English? says:

Ditransitive [i.e. with two objects--Lynneguist] use of write (I wrote them a letter) is common-core English. But some ditransitive verbs can also be used with either object alone: I told them a story. I told a story. I told them. In American English, write belongs to that category: I wrote a letter. I wrote them. In British English, however, if write has a single object, it is normally the ditransitive direct object, and when the ditransitive indirect object occurs instead, it is the object of a preposition: I wrote to them. Also in British, if the direct object function is filled by direct or indirect discourse, the same prohibition against the ditransitive indirect object exists: I wrote to them, "I'll come on Sunday," not ?I wrote them, "I'll come on Sunday." I wrote to them that I would come on Sunday, not ?I wrote them that I would come on Sunday.

So, to sum up:

• I'm writing you a letter is standard AmE and standard BrE.
• I'm writing you to ask a question is fine in AmE and used to be fine in BrE.
  

As for other verbs, Marc mentions send, but we can't use that with just the recipient of the sending in either dialect: *I sent you. (* means 'ungrammatical')

send: I sent a package to him. I sent him a package. I sent a package. *I sent him.

So, send is in the wrong class of verbs for comparison. Write in AmE is more like tell and the following verbs, in that it can both take two objects without any prepositions and it can have just the recipient of the communication as a single object (which may or may not occur with other non-object kinds of things, as indicated in the parentheses/brackets below).

tell: I told Di a secret. I told Di (about the fire).
ask: I asked Di a question. I asked Di (about the fire).
teach: I taught the students an equation. I taught the students (about fire safety).

All of those ditransitive and transitive versions are fine in BrE--so it is only write, as far as I know, that creates a problem. Having a look in Beth Levin's wonderful* English verb classes and their alternations (1993), I'm a little disappointed to find that she's not treated this class of verbs ('Verbs of transfer of a message') fully--but she does admit to this. Since the class also includes things like preach and quote and those don't fall into the same patterns as ask and teach and tell, there's yet some work to be done here.**

So, this is all to say that there are some patterns to be found in verbs of this type, but that not every verb follows them, so it's not surprising that this is an area where dialectal differences might crop up. But don't blame the Americans. We're not the ones who (orig. AmE) ditched a perfectly good transitive verb!

* No, I'm not being sarcastic. Linguists adoooore books like this.
** Hey, final-year students--why not you?!

On occasion, I invite people whose insights I trust to contribute guest posts for the blog. On rare occasions, they deliver the goods! I hope you enjoy this one on terminology in the game of contract bridge.

 

My mother could never understand how I was allowed a (AmE) college/(BrE) university degree without learning to play bridge, but I was educated in the decade of Trivial Pursuit. I tried to rectify this gap in my education in the early 2000s. After maybe three lessons, the couple who were teaching me had a fight and that was the end of that! Maybe learning to play bridge be my retirement project. One of the dozens I have in mind. At any rate, I am not the person to tell you about bridge terminology, but here’s someone who is.

 

Simon Cochemé is an English bridge writer and is a regular contributor of light-hearted articles to bridge magazines. He has recently published a collection of the best of them in a book, Bridge with a Twist (Master Point Press). ‘Destined to be ranked as a classic, alongside its prequel, Oliver Twist.’

 

There are seven chapters on the language of bridge – vocabulary and idioms from (a)round the world. This post is an edited version of the chapter on American terminology – written with American spelling.

***

 

The Language of Bridge III

 

In which we look across the Atlantic at what the Americans have to say

 

George Bernard Shaw (or possibly Oscar Wilde) said that England and America were two nations separated by a common language. Bridge terminology certainly proves the point. We say protect, they say balance; we say switch, they say shift; we say dummy, they [sometimes] say board; we say peter, they say echo; we say tomahto, they say tomayto; we say finesse, they say hook; we say singleton, they say stiff; we say discard, they [often] say pitch.

 

There’s more. They say push instead of flat board, down one instead of one down, ace-fourth instead of ace-to-four, set for beating the contract, and drawing trump rather than drawing trumps, as though they always played in twelve-card fits. You will still occasionally read deuce for the two of a suit, although the quaint trey for the three has all but disappeared.

 

There are some words that have yet to cross the Pond: tight, meaning doubleton, as in ‘He held king-queen tight’ and swish, meaning passed out, as in ‘The bidding went 2♠, swish’. I have also heard (but not seen in print) ‘Four hearts in the East’ where the British would say ‘Four hearts by East’.

 

Things get even more confusing with the word tap. Where we say force (as in force declarer), they say tap; but where we say tap (in plumbing), they say faucet. 

The most extreme of American phrases is ruff ‘n’ sluff for ruff-and-discard. I haven’t seen sluff or slough used anywhere else in bridge literature, so presumably the lure of the rhyme was too hard to resist, as it was with surf ‘n’ turf.

 

Americans like variety in the presentation of their sports results: ‘The Red Sox downed the 49ers’, for example, or ‘The Chipmunks whupped the Bears’. The English tend to stick to the ‘Chelsea beat Liverpool’ formula, with the occasional ‘Villa lost to Spurs’ thrown in. Americans [tend to] put the winning team first, whereas the English usually put the home team first. Either way, the English results are a bit boring. 

 

Sporting metaphors abound in American writing, and I have seen bridge articles where a player covers all bases, or makes a clutch shot, or plays a shut-out. I have no idea what slam-dunk means; it sounds as though you had twelve tricks on top but went one down. I have yet to find mention of a triple-double (basketball) or pass interference (American football), but I’m sure they’re out there.

 

We must fight fire with fire; difficult contracts must be played on sticky wickets and small slams hit for six Declarer must play a blinder, and overbidders should be caught offside or shown the red card.

 

There is a nice expression that I have seen American teachers use, encouraging their pupils to draw trumps before the defenders can ruff something: Get the kids off the streets.

 

The French have names for the kings on their cards (David (from the Bible), Charles (after Charlemagne), Caesar (Julius), and Alexander (the Great). I understand the Americans have noted it and like the idea. They don’t have any real kings of their own, so the debate is whether to reuse the Mount Rushmore quartet, or to go with four from the shortlist of Martin Luther, Stephen, Billie Jean, Burger, Kong and Elvis. [jk—ed.]

 

Let’s have a deal. This one features Zia Mahmood, who was (AmE) on (BrE in) the USA team against Italy in the final of the World Championships in 2009. …

 

[The chapter goes on to describe a bridge deal, the bidding and play, in great detail using the American terms. It will be completely incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t play bridge. If you want to see whether the USA team wins or loses, you will have to buy the book …]

 

***

 

Lynne says: For good measure, here’s a corpus search of that last difference, in/on the team, which goes far beyond bridge:

 

 

 

Bridge with a Twist (RRP £14.95) is available at a number of online sites.

 

 

 

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Scene from a Marriage:

BH and L, the father and mother (respectively) of 5-month-old baby G, stand in their kitchen. G has recently begun eating (BrE) baby rice/ (AmE) rice cereal.

BH: (holding up two plastic measuring spoons) Should we sterili{s/z}e these?

L: Why are there two?

BH: Because I can't find the teaspoon and one's a half-teaspoon and one's a tablespoon. I don't know how many half-teaspoons are in a tablespoon, and it's a teaspoon of rice and a tablespoon of milk.

L: Three teaspoons to a tablespoon, but you can just eyeball it. Three parts milk to one part rice.

BH: Eyeball it? What, are you a cop?

L: Why would a cop say 'eyeball it'?

BH: Because only cops in cheap American detective shows say that.

L: No--graphic designers say it...

BH: No, the cop eyeballs the suspect.

L: ...cooks say it; tailors say it.

BH: No way.

L: Why would a cop say it? It's about measuring.

BH: No, it's about staring.

L: No, it's about measuring.

BH: Prove it.

L: (wild-eyed) Is that a challenge? (determinedly) I'll take your challenge!

(Pan to beautiful but neglected baby...sound of maniacal typing at a computer keyboard. Fade to black.)

So while Grover sleeps on Better Half's chest, I'll fill you in on the outcome of my --ahem-- L's research. The (British) OED sides with BH, giving the verb to eyeball as AmE slang for 'to look or stare (at)'. But one shouldn't trust the 1989 edition of the OED to be up to snuff on American colloquialisms. The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edn), on the other hand, gives two senses, both marked as 'informal':

1. To look over carefully; scrutinize.
2. To measure or estimate roughly by sight: eyeballed the area of the wall that needed paint.

So, it looks here like the OED is up-to-date on senses of eyeball that are known (as AmE slang) in the UK, but not on all AmE senses of the verb. In spite of the ignorance professed above, I have to admit knowledge of the first sense--it just wasn't coming to mind after I, I mean L, used the other sense. But I use the measuring sense often. Since the AHD lists it second, we can assume that it's a later addition to the language than the 'scrutini{s/z}e' sense, but Wiktionary lists it first, giving the impression that it might be a better known sense now. (I've put some feelers out trying to find out when the measuring sense arose. Will update if I get any info. Or will take hard evidence [personal memories are very unreliable when it comes to etymology] in the comments section, please!)

Baking and baked goods are a perennial source of US/UK miscommunication—in large part because most of our current baking/eating habits were only invented after the split between American and British English. We eat different baked goods with newish names and we often use the same old words in different new ways. 

While I've written many posts that have mentioned cake (see links below), I've come to feel the need for a much bigger one about cake. This one has been several (very busy) months in the making.

cake itself

The word cake came into English from Old Norse (or another Scandinavian source) in around the 13th century. Way back then it was a word for a round loaf of bread that was a bit flattened by having been turned over while baking. These days we associate it more with sweet baked goods, usually (but not necessarily) those leavened with something other than yeast. But its round, bready roots come through in things like (Scottish) oatcake (which refers to something more like modern crackers than like modern cakes) and northwestern England's barm cakes, one of the many regional names for the kinds of bread rolls with which you might make a sandwich (in the American sense). Later, cake came to mean any round, flattened food, and thus we have fish cakes and crab cakes and rice cakes and the like. 

People only started using cake as a mass noun referring to the substance (rather than the loaf as a whole) in the 16th century, and from then it increasingly referred to fancy or sweet bread-like things. 

Cake v dessert/pudding

Many Americans would think of cake as a rather normal dessert. But those who've watched the Great British (orig. AmE) Bake Off (GBBO) will have seen that cake and dessert are treated as different things. Such is the case in English culture (at least) more generally. Cake is something you'd have with coffee or tea as a break, not something you'd immediately think of preparing for the final course of a meal. (Though you will find the occasional cake on a UK dessert menu.) As we've already seen in the dessert/pudding post, puddings are another matter. Some look and feel like cakes (e.g., my fave sticky toffee pudding), but are not usually considered cakes in BrE. (Please do go to the pudding post, linked above, if you want to comment on puddings.)

Cake(s) as sweet baked snacks

On the other hand, in certain contexts, all sorts of things can loosely count as cake in England that would not be so called in AmE. Say you went to a coffee shop with your friend. If you were English you might ask them "Which cake do you want?" And your English friend might say "A (orig. AmE) brownie" or "The apple turnover, please" or "The carrot cake, please". If you were American, and you wanted the brownie or the turnover, you'd probably answer that question with "I'm not in the mood for cake, but I'd like that brownie/apple turnover." For Americans, cakes are cakes and other baked goods are other baked goods. For the English, cake can be an umbrella term for sweet baked goods eaten in the situations where one usually eats cakes in the narrower sense. (NB: I'm saying English rather than British because not enough Scottish or Welsh people have offered to buy me cake in coffee shops. More fieldwork needed.)

If I were Americanly asking someone which thing they wanted in the coffee shop, I'd probably say "Which kind of cake do you want?" because "which cake" doesn't really sound right in AmE, where it more usually refers to a big thing that you slice and not an individual serving of it. If a BrE speaker had a cake with their tea, it would fit on a small plate (under which the server will have inexplicably placed a paper napkin as if it's a doily, rendering the napkin useless—a coffee-shop peeve of mine). If an American had a cake with their coffee, they'd be an incredible glutton, eating enough for a dozen people.

AmE snack cake refers to the overly processed small cakes that are packaged for putting in lunch boxes. Twinkies are a famous example, but there are lots of other kinds as well (here's a guide). You can get such individually wrapped cakes in the UK too, e.g. Cadbury Mini Rolls are pretty much the equivalent of a Hostess Ho-Ho and the Mr Kipling brand offers a variety of such products, but I don't know of a generic BrE term for them. But again, we'd call them a snack cake but probably not a cake.

Update, 16 Feb: Here's a great illustration of the BrE cakes = 'sweet baked snacks' meaning. I took this photo at a campus café, where they were trying to offload baked goods before the weekend. The sign reads "All cakes £1.00" and all those things in the picture counted as cakes for the purposes of the £1 promotion. These include (if you can't see them): cookies, flapjacks, millionaire's shortbread (and possibly some other tray bakes [see below]), (American-style) muffins, and filled and unfilled croissants. In AmE,  you'd need to say "all baked goods" or something like that, rather than "all cakes". 

Types of cake

A very noticeable thing if you watch GBBO is the constant reference to sponge. Americans can use the term sponge cake (emphasis on the cake) but don't use it often because that's the prototypical cake type—and you don't need to specify the most typical type. (I've discussed the psycholinguistic concept of prototypes here.) It'd be like saying cloth shirt—almost redundant. 

[Update: see the comments for some more-informed American takes on sponge, which seem to indicate that for AmE sponge is a method (making with egg whites, not butter) and for BrE it's a result (a spongy texture). This fits beautifully with other examples of Americans naming things in reference to the form of the ingredients (pre-assembly) and British using names relating to the form of the result. See previous discussions of mashed potato(es) and scrambled egg(s) and burgers and hot dogs for other examples.]

But BrE speakers are more likely to call it sponge than to call it sponge cake, if that's the kind of cake they're talking about. A Victoria sponge (aka Victoria sandwich) is a two-layer cake with jam (and often cream) in the middle (no icing/frosting on top)—a very common cake in England. On GBBO they talk about lots of different types of sponge, like genoise or joconde, but that's specialist jargon that you don't tend to hear elsewhere. If you want more about those, see this Wikipedia entry.

from Meg Rivers Bakers

A reason that BrE speakers need to talk about sponge is that it's not necessarily the default cake type. Fruit cakes are very traditional and (get ready for a shocker, Americans) even loved in England. You cannot imagine my disappointment the first time I was handed a slice of English wedding cake and discovered it wasn't a nice, white sponge cake like I was expecting, but a fruit cake as in the photo to the left. When I got married in England, I had to insist that one of our cake's layers was not fruit. I didn't care what it was, as long as it wasn't fruitcake. 

(A note on spelling: AmE prefers fruitcake and BrE goes both ways: fruit cake or fruitcake.)

The traditional English Christmas cake is also a fruit cake. This has been adopted to a small degree in the US, where there is some tradition of giving fruitcakes as Christmas gifts. (When/where I was a kid, the local Lions Club sold them as Christmastime fundraiser. It seems they still do in New Zealand.) But Americans also have the tradition of mocking fruitcakes as the worst cake and the worst gift, starting with Johnny Carson in 1973: "The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other." American fruitcakes are generally unfrosted/uniced, whereas English Christmas cakes have white royal icing (see link) and decoration.

American wedding cakes are often made of white cake, which is a kind of sponge made with only the whites of the egg (here's a recipe—notice how it Americanly never uses the word sponge). Americans also talk about yellow cake, where the yolks are left in. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting is a well-known combination. I could link to another recipe, but I'll instead show a picture of a very typical American cake mix—these, like many things, come in many more varieties in the US than in the UK. 

While there aren't as many cake mixes in the UK, there are a lot of long-life ready-made cakes in boxes. (Something that surprised me when I moved to England.) The popularity of one supermarket chain's Colin the Caterpillar cake (the birthday cake for one side of my UK family) gave rise to the 'generification' of the caterpillar cake, which gave rise to lawsuits and news stories last year. (Click on the last link for pictures.)

Another cake type I've tweeted about a lot is coffee cake:

Difference of the Day: 'coffee cake' In AmE, a type of cake, often with a cinnamon crumble topping or similar, that's meant to be eaten with coffee. In BrE, a cake flavo(u)red with coffee. I've done this one before, but I had such a gorgeous AmE one that I had to share: pic.twitter.com/UKK7omY6aO

— Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) April 9, 2018

Other US cake types include (links are to Wikipedia):

• angel food cake (a very light sponge made with egg whites and cream of tartar—an ingredient that seems to show up in US baking a lot more than UK baking)  
• devil's food cake, which would probably be called chocolate fudge cake in BrE
• pound cake, which isn't necessarily American, but it's much more common in the US—and thus shows up nearly seven times as much in AmE as BrE in the GloWbE corpus.

On the UK side, one runs into lemon drizzle cake a lot, while in the US one mostly gets lemon cake or lemon bars.

Image from Wikipedia

No discussion of the BrE meaning of cake is complete without mention of the Jaffa cake, which Americans would call a cookie. It is a little disc of sponge cake with a bit of orange jam/[AmE] jelly on top and dark chocolate on top of that. [I'd originally written BrE jelly/AmE gelatin here, which it might well be, but I went with what Wikipedia said.] There was a famous court case about whether such things should be taxed, since there is (or was?) VAT ('value-added tax', approximately AmE sales tax) on chocolate-covered (BrE) biscuits (AmE cookies), which are a luxury item, but no VAT on cakes, which are, apparently, a necessity. Part of the decision to label them as cakes was based on the appraisal that cakes go hard when they get stale, whereas (British) biscuits go soft when they're stale (thus demonstrating a main difference between BrE biscuit and AmE cookie).

cake accoutrements & shapes

The utensil with which you lift a slice of cake is a cake slice (BrE 1810s) or a cake server (AmE ?1890s).

Ring-shaped cakes made in fluted pans/tins are common in Europe, but it's in the US that they came to be known as Bundt cakes, after the trademarked name of a pan sold by the Nordic Ware company. (See Wikipedia for more.) 

Sheet cakes also seem to be an AmE invention—these are unlayered, frosted (and often decorated) sponge cakes made in a rectangular pan. People talked about them a bit more after Tina Fey went onto Saturday Night Live to propose "sheet caking" as a method of dealing with far-right demonstrations.

(I must say, though, that her sheet cake seems tall enough that it must be layered.)  

In BrE I've seen a sheet cake referred to as a tray bake, but tray bake is used for all sorts of things that are baked in a low, rectangular pan/tin/tray, including the things Americans would call bar cookies. (For past posts about cookies, see here.)

I've written before about AmE cupcake v BrE fairy cake. In BrE today, cupcake has been imported for bigger, fancier ones.

[Late addition, 27 Dec]: I'd thought I'd written here about BrE loaf cakes v American quick breads, but my memory played tricks on me—I must have been remembering writing about it in The Prodigal Tongue. In the book, I use two banana bread recipes as illustration of how many levels AmE and BrE can differ on, and one of the differences is that at one point in the British recipe, the banana bread is called "the cake". Many sweet, loaf-shaped things that Americans bake and might well slice and butter (banana bread, zucchini (BrE courgette) bread, pumpkin bread, ) turn up as [ingredient] loaf cake in UK coffee shops. (When transferred to BrE cake status, they often have icing drizzled over.) Here's a bit of what I wrote in The Prodigal Tongue:

American baking has a traditional category called quick breads, that is, breads leavened without yeast. Quick breads include banana bread, zucchini (= UK courgette) bread, and my mother’s famous pumpkin bread, as well as American biscuits (which look a bit like British scones, but don’t feel or taste like them) and what the British call American-style muffins, including blueberry muffins and bran muffins (though they’ve proved so popular in the UK that the American-style is usually left off these days). In an American cookbook, these recipes are located in the bread chapter. Banana breads and blueberry muffins are relatively new to Britain, and they came over without the larger quick bread category. They thus fell into the cake category.

cake expressions

a piece of cake comes from AmE in the 1960s and means 'easy'. BrE has borrowed it and added a more vulgar version: a piece of piss.

that takes the cake (AmE 1830s) versus that takes the biscuit (BrE 1880s)  = 'it is the best/it wins' (though these days it's mostly used ironically to indicate something that "wins" at being the worst).

off one's cake (BrE informal)  = deranged [1880s]; extremely intoxicated [1980s]

bake sale (AmE 1890s) v cake stall (BrE 1600s, but then a more formal business) v cake sale (now more BrE than AmE, but Irish & AmE evidence precedes BrE evidence) = selling donated baked goods as a fundraiser

more links

Before commenting on this post with comments suggesting or asking questions about other baked goods, please see these past blog posts. Comments are welcome on those old posts—conversations on this blog keep on going.

baked goods (misc., includes the usual suspects)

(more on) cookie, (more on) biscuit

icing & frosting

pudding

molasses, treacle, golden syrup, caramel, toffee (and see the comments there for more on gingerbread)

types of: flour, cream, milk, eggs (that last one's less baking orient(at)ed)

bake-off

candy & sweets

P.S. It's the time of year when I declare the US>UK and UK>US Words of the Year and nominations have been very, very thin this year. Please let me know if you have any nominations for these categories!