Other forms: steaks
A steak is a thick expensive slice of beef, cooked rare to well done. A rib-eye steak, steak and chips, well-done steak.
The cut decides everything: rib-eye and sirloin are tender and suit fast cooking, and the cheaper cuts want time. Resting the meat after cooking is the step most often skipped and it matters. Steak also names thick slices of fish — a tuna steak. Note that the word is from Old Norse and originally meant meat roasted on a stick.
1nounsteakA thick expensive slice of beef.
“He ordered his steak medium rare with chips on the side.”
steak is a cut of meat.
Old Norse steik meant meat roasted on a stick, related to steikja, to roast. Stick and stake come from the same pointed root.
Old Norse
steik
Middle English
steike
English, today
steak
Built from
From Middle English steike, from Old Norse steik. From Middle English steike, from Old Norse steik (“roast; meat roasted on a stick”). The verb is either from the noun or from steikja (“to roast”). The modern pronunciation shows an irregular change of Early Modern English to in the standard language; contrast this with the development of other words such as speak and wreak.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA