Cooker

How to spell cooker

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cooker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cooker mean?

1. nounA kitchen appliance, typically combining an oven and a hob, used for cooking food.

Cooker in a sentence

• The new cooker has five gas burners and a fan oven.

• She switched off the cooker before leaving the house.

Where does cooker come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base verb 'cook' descends from Old English 'cocian', which was itself borrowed early from the Latin 'coquus', meaning 'a cook', and the related verb 'coquere', 'to cook' or 'to ripen'. That Latin family also gave us 'kitchen', 'biscuit' (literally 'twice cooked'), and 'concoct', all sharing the idea of preparing or processing with heat. The agent and instrument suffix '-er' was added in English to form a noun naming the thing or person that cooks; this suffix is the same one seen in 'toaster' and 'heater'. The appliance sense, a stove with an oven and hob, became firmly established in British usage during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as gas and electric ranges spread through homes. Because the word is built so transparently from 'cook' plus '-er', its spelling rarely troubles writers; the only point to watch is the doubled 'oo' rather than a single 'o'.

How the word is built

• cook (to prepare food with heat)
• -er (instrument/agent suffix)