Stew

How to spell stew

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stew

What does stew mean?

1. nounA dish of meat and vegetables cooked slowly in liquid.
2. verbTo cook food slowly in liquid over gentle heat.
3. verbTo remain in a state of anxiety or resentment over something.

Stew in a sentence

• noun

  A thick beef stew simmered on the stove all afternoon.

• verb

  You should stew the apples until they soften into a pulp.

• verb

  He tends to stew over small mistakes for days.

• noun

  She ladled the stew into bowls and served it with crusty bread.

• verb

  Let the tomatoes stew on a low flame for an hour.

• verb

  There is no point letting yourself stew about a decision already made.

Where does stew come from?

Language of origin: French

Stew arrived in English in the 1300s from the Old French estuve, which meant a heated room, a steam bath, or a hot vapour, and from the related verb estuver, 'to bathe in hot water or steam'. Behind the French lies a Vulgar Latin form extufare, meaning roughly 'to bathe in steam', built on the Greek-derived tuphos, 'smoke or vapour'. The earliest English uses had nothing to do with food: a 'stew' was a public hot bath or steam room, and the plural 'stews' even came to mean a brothel, since such bathhouses had a seedy reputation. Only later did the idea of food slowly softened in hot liquid take over, because cooking in a sealed, steaming vessel mirrored the steam-bath sense. That same heated, simmering image survives in the figurative 'stewing' over a problem, where a person sits and broods in their own anxious heat.

How the word is built

• stew (single root from Old French estuve, a hot bath or steam room); no prefix or suffix