As easy as pie
"As easy as pie" is a popular colloquial idiom and simile which is used to describe a task or experience as pleasurable and simple.[1][2] The phrase is often interchanged with piece of cake, which shares the same connotation.[2]
Origin
The phrase was used in 1910 by Zane Grey in "The Young Forester" and in the Saturday Evening Post of 22 February 1913. It may have been a development of the phrase like eating pie, first recorded in Sporting Life in 1886. In 1855, the phrase, in a slight variation was published in a book called Which? Right or Left? Here it was used as nice as a pie.[3] Alternatively, in pre-reformation England the collection of liturgical rules for all 35 various days when Easter could fall was called Pie. Easy as pie could be ironically referring to overly complicated rubrics.[4]
There are some claims that its use in New Zealand in the 1920s was influenced by the similar expressions pie at or pie on from the Maori term pai 'good'.
References
- Almond, Jordan (1995-01-01). Dictionary of word origins: a history of the words, expressions, and clichés we use. Citadel Press. p. 87. ISBN 978-0-8065-1713-1. Retrieved 29 November 2010.
- Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. London, United Kingdom: Chambers Harrap Publishers. 2009. pp. sec. As.
- Dictionary, The Idioms. "As easy as pie phrase origin". Theidioms.com. Retrieved 28 July 2018.
- The Oxford English Dictionary, 193.3
Further reading
- Flexner, Stuart Berg (1979-10-01). I hear America talking: an illustrated history of American words and phrases. Simon and Schuster. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-671-24994-6. Retrieved 29 November 2010.