Other forms: cooking, cooked, cooks
To cook is to prepare food using heat. Cook the rice, cook dinner, learn to cook. It covers boiling, frying, roasting and baking — everything except making a sandwich.
It works without an object too, and then it means both to do the cooking and, of food, to be cooking: he cooks every night, and the potatoes are cooking. The noun is the person: she is a good cook. Note the phrasal verbs — cook up, meaning to invent an excuse or a plan, and the informal cook the books, meaning to falsify accounts. And what's cooking? is a friendly way of asking what is going on.
1verbcookTo prepare food using heat.
“He cooks properly about twice a week.”
2verbpreparedOf food, to be prepared by heat.
“The rice is still cooking.”
3nounpreparesSomebody who prepares food.
“She is a far better cook than she admits.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cook is a way of preparing food.
Old English coc came from Latin cocus, from coquere, to cook — the same root as kitchen, precocious, which is cooked early, and biscuit, which is cooked twice. The verb is younger than the noun in English: for centuries there were cooks but no verb to describe what they did.
Middle English
cook
English, today
cook
From Middle English cook. From Middle English cook, from Old English cōc (“a cook”), from Latin cocus, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European pekʷ- (“to cook, become ripe”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA