What does "oven" mean?

1. (cooking appliance) a piece of kitchen equipment with a door that you use for baking or roasting food. 2. (a very hot place) a room or building that is uncomfortably hot. 3. (to cook in an oven) to cook something inside an oven.

oven

n. · v.

US //ˈəvən// UK //ˈʌvən// oven

1 cooking appliance (n.)
A2 Elementary Cooking

a piece of kitchen equipment with a door that you use for baking or roasting food.

an enclosed compartment for cooking or heating food, typically powered by gas or electricity.

Example

She put the tray of cookies into the oven and set the timer for ten minutes.

Example

The chef preheated the industrial oven to two hundred degrees before searing the roast to ensure an even distribution of heat during the baking process.
- stove
- kiln
2 a very hot place (n.)
B2 Upper Intermediate Informal Humorous

a room or building that is uncomfortably hot.

a figurative extension describing an environment with excessively high ambient temperatures.

Example

It is like an oven in this office because the air conditioning is broken.

Example

Stepping out of the air-conditioned terminal into the midday desert heat was like walking directly into an oven.
- furnace
- sauna
- fridge
- freezer

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3 to cook in an oven (v.)
C2 Proficiency Informal Cooking

to cook something inside an oven.

to subject food to the heat of an oven; used as a transitive verb taking a direct object.

Example

You can oven the vegetables for twenty minutes until they are soft.

Example

While most prefer to grill the peppers, some home cooks choose to oven them to achieve a more uniform texture throughout the dish.
- bake
- roast

Origin

From Middle English oven, from Old English ofn (“oven”), from Proto-West Germanic ofn (“oven”), from Proto-Germanic uhnaz, uhwnaz (“oven”). Cognate with West Frisian ûne (“oven”), Dutch oven (“oven”), Low German Aven (“oven”), German Ofen (“oven”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål ovn (“oven”), Faroese ovnur (“oven”), Icelandic ofn (“oven”), Norwegian Nynorsk omn (“oven”), Swedish ugn (“oven”), Finnish uuni (“oven”), Gothic 𐌰𐌿𐌷𐌽𐍃 (auhns, “oven”)), probably from a Proto-Indo-European aukʷ- (“cooking pot”), Hukʷ-, ukʷnos (compare Sanskrit उखा (ukhā, “boiler, cauldron”), Albanian anë (“vessel, cooker”), Latin aulla, olla (“pot, jar”), Ancient Greek ἰπνός (ipnós, “oven, furnace”)). The modern pronunciation shows an sound change in which Middle English /ɔv/ is changed to /uv/; compare the phonetic development of Coventry and shovel.