Roast

How to spell roast

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce roast

What does roast mean?

1. verbTo cook food, especially meat or vegetables, using dry heat in an oven or over a fire.
2. nounA piece of meat that has been or will be cooked using dry heat.
3. verbTo criticise or make fun of someone harshly, often in a humorous public setting.

Roast in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to roast a chicken slowly with garlic and lemon.

• noun

  The Sunday roast was carved at the table and shared between them.

• verb

  His colleagues planned to roast him with jokes at the retirement party.

• verb

  You can roast the peppers until their skins blacken and blister.

• noun

  He bought a generous beef roast for the family dinner.

• verb

  Critics will roast any film that wastes such a large budget.

Where does roast come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English through Old French, where the verb rostir meant 'to cook by exposing to dry heat'. That French form was itself borrowed from a Germanic source, the Frankish word raustjan, which carried the same idea of cooking meat over a fire or before flames. English adopted it in the 1200s, first describing the cooking of meat on a spit, and the noun for a cut of meat prepared this way followed soon after. Over the centuries the figurative sense grew up alongside the literal one: to 'roast' someone came to mean to expose them to a fierce blast of mockery, much as meat is exposed to heat. The spelling settled with the 'oa' digraph for the long 'o' sound, a pattern English also keeps in 'toast' and 'coast', which is a handy memory link.

How the word is built

• roast (whole word, from Old French rostir 'to roast'); no separable prefix or suffix