Cooking

How to spell cooking

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cooking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cooking mean?

1. nounThe practice or process of preparing food, especially with heat.
2. adjectiveSuitable or intended for use in preparing food.

Cooking in a sentence

• noun

  Cooking for a large family every night takes real planning.

• adjective

  She added a splash of cooking oil to the hot pan.

• noun

  He took an evening class in French cooking to improve his skills.

• adjective

  These tart cooking apples are too sharp to eat raw.

Where does cooking come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'cook' goes back to the Old English 'cōc', a noun for someone who prepares food, which English had itself taken from the Latin 'coquus' meaning 'a cook', related to the verb 'coquere', 'to cook' or 'to ripen'. For centuries 'cook' was only the person, not the action; the verb 'to cook' did not become common in English until around the fourteenth century. The form 'cooking' adds the native English '-ing' ending, which turns a verb into either a present participle or a noun naming the activity itself. The same Latin 'coquere' root quietly survives in words like 'kitchen', 'biscuit' (literally 'twice cooked'), and 'precocious' (originally 'ripened early'). The spelling is gentle for adults: the doubled 'oo' simply represents the short vowel sound, and the only thing to remember is the single 'k' before '-ing'.

How the word is built

• cook (to prepare food by heating)
• -ing (gerund/participle suffix)