Other forms: ovens
An oven is the hot box in the kitchen where you bake bread or roast a chicken. A door, a dial, and a light that lets you watch.
It cooks by surrounding food with heat, which is what separates it from a hob or a grill. A fan oven moves the air about and cooks faster. English gets useful phrases from it: something has a bun in the oven when a baby is on the way, and a room like an oven is unbearably hot. Oven gloves and an oven-ready meal both take the name.
1nounovenAn enclosed compartment for baking and roasting food.
“Put it in a hot oven for forty minutes.”
Patternput sth in / take sth out of the oven · preheat the oven · a hot / fan / gas oven · oven glove / dish
OvEN → an EVEN heat on every side
Close the door and the heat comes from every side, even all round, until the bread inside is brown all over.
hooks ontoeven
Oven has come down almost untouched. Old English ofn sits on Proto-Germanic uhnaz, and the same word is still in Dutch, German and Frisian today.
Proto-Germanic
*uhnaz
Proto-West Germanic
*ofn — oven
Old English
ofn — oven
Middle English
oven
English, today
oven
Built from
From Middle English oven, from Old English ofn (“oven”), from Proto-West Germanic ofn (“oven”), from Proto-Germanic uhnaz, uhwnaz (“oven”). Cognate with West Frisian ûne (“oven”), Dutch oven (“oven”), Low German Aven (“oven”), German Ofen (“oven”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål ovn (“oven”), Faroese ovnur (“oven”), Icelandic ofn (“oven”), Norwegian Nynorsk omn (“oven”), Swedish ugn (“oven”), Finnish uuni (“oven”), Gothic 𐌰𐌿𐌷𐌽𐍃 (“oven”)), probably from a Proto-Indo-European aukʷ- (“cooking pot”), Hukʷ-, ukʷnos (compare Sanskrit उखा (“boiler, cauldron”), Albanian anë (“vessel, cooker”), Latin aulla, olla (“pot, jar”), Ancient Greek ἰπνός (“oven, furnace”)). The modern pronunciation shows a sound change in which Middle English is changed to; compare the phonetic development of Coventry and shovel.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA