cache

American  

[kash] / kæʃ /

noun

1. a hiding place, especially one in the ground, for ammunition, food, treasures, etc..

   She hid her jewelry in a little cache in the cellar.

2. anything so hidden.

   The enemy never found our cache of food.

   Synonyms:

   store, reserve, stockpile, hoard

3. Also called cache storage.  Computers. a temporary storage space or memory that allows fast access to data.

   Web browser cache;

   CPU cache.

4. Alaska and Northern Canada. a small shed elevated on poles above the reach of animals and used for storing food, equipment, etc.

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verb (used with object)

cached, caching

1. to put in a cache; conceal; hide.

   Synonyms:

   secrete

cache British  

/ kæʃ /

noun

1. a hidden store of provisions, weapons, treasure, etc

2. the place where such a store is hidden

3. computing a small high-speed memory that improves computer performance

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verb

1. (tr) to store in a cache

cache Scientific  

/ kăsh /

1. An area of computer memory devoted to the high-speed retrieval of frequently used or requested data.

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Etymology

Origin of cache

First recorded in 1585–95; from French, noun derivative of cacher “to hide,” from unattested Vulgar Latin coācticāre “to stow away,” originally, “to pack together,” frequentative of Latin coāctāre, equivalent to Latin coāct(us) “collected” (past participle of cōgere “to collect, compel”) + -icā- formative verb suffix + -re infinitive ending

Example Sentences

TurboQuant is an algorithm designed to address bottlenecks in the key-value cache, which Google describes as a “digital cheat sheet,” effectively acting as the short-term memory for an artificial-intelligence model.

From Barron's • Mar. 26, 2026

When Lithuanian police began rounding up members of the parcel plot they discovered a further cache of explosives, buried in food cans at a cemetery.

From BBC • Mar. 11, 2026

The cache of documents offer a rare glimpse into the inner sanctum of the Silicon Valley elite, revealing how deals are made and even how they regard one another.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 28, 2026

A KV cache stores conversation history during large language model inference, or when the LLM is running, so that it doesn’t have to recompute.

From MarketWatch • Jan. 14, 2026

A mere ten days ago, after rooting around on the Internet for a little while, Molly located a cache of adoption registry services, narrowing her search to the one rated highest among users.

From "Orphan Train" by Christina Baker Kline

Related Words

• hideout
• hoard
• nest egg
• repository
• stash
• stockpile
• storehouse
• treasure
• wealth