Stove

How to spell stove

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stove

What does stove mean?

1. nounAn appliance with one or more burners or hotplates used for cooking food, often combined with an oven.
2. nounAn enclosed apparatus that burns fuel to warm a room.

Stove in a sentence

• She left a pot simmering on the stove while she chopped the vegetables.

• The cabin was heated by an old cast-iron wood stove in the corner.

• The gas stove would not light, so we called a repair technician.

• They fed another log into the stove to keep the workshop warm.

Where does stove come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word goes back to a Germanic root meaning a heated room or a hot-air bath, seen in the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch 'stove' and the related Old English 'stofa', which named a small warmed chamber. The earliest English senses were not about cookers at all but about a room kept hot, sometimes specifically a sweating room or bath house, since the warmth was the defining idea. From that came the sense of a heated enclosure for forcing plants to grow, a 'stove house' much like a hothouse. By the 1400s and 1500s the meaning had narrowed to the apparatus that produced the heat itself, an iron or brick contrivance for burning fuel, and later the kitchen appliance used for cooking. The same family of words gave German 'Stube' (a parlour or living room) and is even thought to lie behind 'stew', which links cooking in a closed, hot vessel back to the original idea of an enclosed warm space.

How the word is built

• stove (single root from Germanic, originally meaning a heated room or hot-air bath)