Cook

How to spell cook

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cook

What does cook mean?

1. verbTo prepare food by applying heat.
2. nounA person who prepares food, especially as a job.

Cook in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to cook a roast dinner every Sunday.

• noun

  The restaurant hired a new cook to run the kitchen.

• verb

  They decided to cook the vegetables in a little olive oil.

• noun

  As a cook on the oil rig, she fed forty workers a day.

Where does cook come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin coquus, meaning 'a cook', and the related verb coquere, 'to cook' or 'to ripen'. The noun was borrowed into Old English very early as cōc, during the period when Latin-speaking traders and the church were influencing everyday Germanic vocabulary, which is why an apparently homely English word actually has a classical pedigree. The verb sense, 'to prepare food by heating', grew up later in Middle English from the noun. The same coquere root survives in a surprising spread of relatives, including 'kitchen', 'biscuit' (literally 'twice cooked'), 'precocious' (literally 'cooked early', hence ripening ahead of time), and 'concoct'. The hard c spelling at both ends reflects the Latin c sound, and the double o simply mirrors the long vowel that settled into the word over centuries.

How the word is built

• cook (from Latin coquus: a cook, via Old English cōc)