Oven

How to spell oven

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce oven

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does oven mean?

1. nounAn enclosed compartment that is heated for baking, roasting, or warming food.

Oven in a sentence

• She slid the roasting tin into the oven and set a timer.

• The recipe says to preheat the oven to a high temperature.

Where does oven come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Oven comes from the Old English ofen, which named a furnace or kiln for baking and firing. It belongs to a wide Germanic family: Old High German had ofan, Dutch has oven, and modern German keeps Ofen for a stove or furnace. Linguists trace all of these back to a prehistoric Germanic root meaning a cooking pot or baking vessel, with even more distant cousins in Latin aulla and Greek ipnos, both words for a pot or stove. The spelling is a classic trap because the first vowel is pronounced like the 'u' in 'cover' rather than the long 'o' you might expect from the letter, so writers sometimes hesitate over the leading 'o'. The word has stayed remarkably stable in form across more than a thousand years of English.

How the word is built

• oven (single Old English root ofen meaning furnace or kiln; no separable prefix or suffix)