Raw means not cooked. Raw carrot sticks beside a bowl of hummus, raw fish in sushi, the raw egg you crack into the flour before it turns into anything.
The word reaches a long way past food. Raw materials are the wood, ore and cotton that arrive at a factory before anything is made of them, and raw data is what comes out of a survey before anyone tidies it. Skin rubbed until it stings is raw, and so is a throat after a night of coughing. Weather can be raw as well — cold, damp and unkind, the sort of grey afternoon that gets inside your coat. Feelings go the same way: raw grief, raw honesty, a performance with raw energy. A raw recruit is new and untrained, and a raw deal is unfair treatment.
1adjectiverawNot cooked.
“He ate the carrot raw, straight out of the bag.”
Patternraw + noun (meat, fish, vegetables) · eat sth raw · raw in the middle · rawness
synonyms: uncooked
2adjectiveunprocessedIn its natural state, before being processed or refined.
“The mill takes in raw cotton from three countries.”
synonyms: unprocessed, crude
3adjectiveskinOf skin: sore and red from being rubbed or scraped.
“Her hands were raw from the cold water.”
4adjectiveweatherOf weather: unpleasantly cold and damp.
“It was a raw morning, with fog sitting on the fields.”
5adjectivefeelingsOf feelings: strong, open and undisguised.
“There is a raw honesty in the way she writes about her father.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: uncooked
RAW → WAR backwards: a lion's dinner
Spell it backwards and you get war — and a lion at war with its dinner does not cook it first. It eats the meat raw.
hooks ontowar
Old English hrēaw meant raw, uncooked, from Proto-Germanic *hrawaz and the Proto-Indo-European root *krewh₂-, "raw meat, fresh blood". That root travelled far: Latin crūdus, which gives English crude, and Irish cró and Russian кровь, both meaning blood. Raw has had blood in it from the start, which is why raw grief still sounds right.
Proto-Indo-European
*krewh₂- — raw meat, fresh blood
Proto-Germanic
*hrawaz
Proto-West Germanic
*hrau
Old English
hrēaw — raw, uncooked
Middle English
rawe
English, today
raw
Built from
From Middle English rawe, raw, rau, from Old English hrēaw (“raw, uncooked”), from Proto-West Germanic hrau, from Proto-Germanic hrawaz, hrēwaz (“raw”), from Proto-Indo-European krewh₂- (“raw meat, fresh blood”). Cognate with Scots raw (“raw”), Dutch rauw (“raw”), German roh (“raw”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish rå (“raw”), Faroese ráur (“raw”), Icelandic hrár (“raw”), Latin crūdus (“raw, bloody, uncooked”), Irish cró (“blood”), Lithuanian kraujas (“blood”), Russian кровь (“blood”). Related also to Old English hrēow, hrēoh (“rough, fierce, wild, angry, disturbed, troubled, sad, stormy, tempestuous”). More at ree. Doublet of crude.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA