oven

The word “oven” means an enclosed chamber used for baking, roasting, or heating food. In plain terms, an appliance or chamber for cooking with dry heat.

“Oven” is pronounced UH-vn (/ˈʌ.vn̩/ in IPA).

Here is “oven” used in a sentence: “Preheat the oven to 200 degrees before baking the bread.”

“Oven” is a noun.

The word “oven” comes from Old English. From Old English ofn, going back to a Proto-Germanic word for "oven," itself likely from an ancient root meaning "cooking pot.".

“Oven” is a fairly common word in modern English, usually learned at around the A2 level.

“Oven” has 2 distinct senses listed in this dictionary. The most common is: an enclosed chamber used for baking, roasting, or heating food.

An oven is an enclosed chamber used for baking, roasting, or heating food, while a stove (or cooktop) is the set of burners you cook on from above. In many kitchens the two are combined in one appliance, which is why the words are often mixed up.

A conventional oven surrounds food with hot air, which is what allows baking, roasting, and browning. A microwave heats food much faster using microwaves, but it does not brown or crisp food the way an oven does.

Informally, oven describes any place that feels extremely hot. Saying a car or room is "like an oven" compares its trapped heat to the enclosed, heated chamber used for cooking.

Both are enclosed heating chambers, but an oven is used for cooking food, while a kiln reaches much higher temperatures to fire pottery, bricks, or ceramics and to dry materials such as timber. You bake bread in an oven; you fire clay in a kiln.