As easy as pie explained

"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'.

Further reading

• Book: Flexner, Stuart Berg. I hear America talking: an illustrated history of American words and phrases. registration. 29 November 2010. 1979-10-01. Simon and Schuster. 978-0-671-24994-6. 69.

External links

• As easy as pie
• "piece of cake" in Wiktionary

Notes and References

1. Book: Almond, Jordan. Dictionary of word origins: a history of the words, expressions, and clichés we use. 29 November 2010. 1995-01-01. Citadel Press. 978-0-8065-1713-1. 87.
2. Book: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 2009. Chambers Harrap Publishers. London, United Kingdom. sec. As.
3. Web site: Dictionary . The Idioms . As easy as pie phrase origin . Theidioms.com . 28 July 2018.
4. The Oxford English Dictionary, 193.3