Cooked

How to spell cooked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cooked

What does cooked mean?

1. verbPast tense of cook: prepared food by heating it.
2. adjectiveHaving been prepared by heating; no longer raw.

Cooked in a sentence

• verb

  She cooked the rice while the curry simmered on the next ring.

• adjective

  The label warns that the meat must be fully cooked before serving.

• verb

  He cooked dinner for the whole family after the long drive home.

• adjective

  A plate of cooked vegetables sat warming under the lamp.

Where does cooked come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word 'cook' reaches back to the Latin coquus, a noun meaning 'a cook', which was itself formed from the verb coquere, 'to boil, bake, or ripen'. Old English borrowed the noun very early as cōc, and the verb 'to cook' grew from it later, taking on the familiar past form by adding the native Germanic ending -ed. The same Latin coquere root quietly survives in a string of English words about heat and ripening, including 'concoct', 'biscuit' (literally 'twice cooked'), and even 'precocious' (something that ripens early). The spelling keeps a double 'o' for the short vowel sound and the silent-looking but pronounced 'k' before the regular -ed, which is sounded as a crisp 't' here rather than a separate syllable. Because the word is so common and follows the ordinary rule of simply adding -ed, its spelling rarely troubles adult writers.

How the word is built

• cook (to prepare food with heat)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)