stove
1 Americannoun
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stoves
plural
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a portable or fixed apparatus that furnishes heat for warmth, cooking, etc., commonly using coal, oil, gas, wood, or electricity as a source of power.
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a heated chamber or box for some special purpose, as a drying room or a kiln for firing pottery.
verb (used with object)
verb
noun
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another word for cooker
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any heating apparatus, such as a kiln
verb
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to process (ceramics, metalwork, etc) by heating in a stove
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to stew (meat, vegetables, etc)
verb
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of stove
1425–75; (noun) late Middle English: sweat bath, heated room, probably < Middle Dutch, Middle Low German, cognate with Old English stofa, stofu heated room for bathing, Old High German stuba ( German Stube room; cf. bierstube), Old Norse stofa; early Germanic borrowing < Vulgar Latin *extupa, *extūpa (> French étuve sweat room of a bath; cf. stew 1), noun derivative of *extūpāre, *extūfāre to fill with vapor, equivalent to Latin ex- ex- 1 + Vulgar Latin *-tūfāre < Greek tȳ́phein to raise smoke, smoke, akin to tŷphos fever ( see typhus); alternatively explained as a native Germanic base, borrowed into Romance ( cf. izba); (v.) late Middle English stoven to subject to hot-air bath, derivative of the noun
Explanation
A stove is a machine that heats or cooks. If you want really delicious popcorn, don't use the microwave — cook it the old-fashioned way, in a pot of hot oil on the stove. Stoves typically use gas or electricity. If you have a wood-burning stove in your house, you know it's an apparatus that burns split logs to create enough heat to warm up a room — or several rooms. In the 15th century, stove meant either "heated room" or "bathroom." Experts aren't sure about the word's origin, although some guess a connection to Vulgar Latin's extufare, "take a steam bath."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
He and his roommates would use up to six stove burners at a time to prepare meals together, he said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 9, 2026
I grew up in eastern Kentucky and attended grade school in a four-room schoolhouse without indoor plumbing that had a potbelly stove for heat in the winter.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026
On 17 July, part of the Rustic Stomp festival near Wareham, Dorset, was destroyed by a fire that started when a camping stove set fire to a tent.
From BBC ● Jul. 30, 2026
Working in food, my office is quite literally the kitchen: I write at a repurposed steel prep table, with my laptop on top and Dutch ovens stored below, that sits directly beside the stove.
From Salon ● Jul. 21, 2026
Mama could have coffee on the stove and a cake in the oven as fast as most people could say, “best wishes.”
From "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom
They include steel, aluminum, clothing, smartphones and other electronics, fish, dishwashers, washing machines, and stoves.
From Slate ● Aug. 25, 2026
However, the group’s stoves division was significantly impacted by “highly unpredictable tariffs imposed by the U.S.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 21, 2026
It's a mammoth task: The vast majority of the city's 20,500 licensed food carts -- selling pretzels, peanuts and ice cream -- rely on generators to power stoves, freezers and ventilators.
From Barron's ● Jul. 25, 2026
But he said concerns usually fall away when they learn more about induction stoves.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 18, 2026
They were proper brick buildings with stoves or fireplaces in each room.
From "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys
No one ever ovened a cake or stoved an egg, but Americans are microwaving with impunity.
From Time Magazine Archive
I've made her a present, and it's not infectious, because Miss Birks has had it stoved.
From The School by the Sea by Angela Brazil
Vermilion must be stoved at a very gentle heat.
From Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and Galvanizing by William N. Brown
It is possible to enter only in calm weather, or the boat would be stoved in against the rocky archway.
From From Pole to Pole A Book for Young People by Sven Anders Hedin
Some of the planking had been charred by the old process, some stoved by the new, and the remainder had been neither stoved nor charred.
From Ancient and Modern Ships. Part 1. Wooden Sailing Ships by George C. V. Holmes
Black hold, the detonations fierce, floor puddled with wet sick; heaving; victory blotched by fog and rain, the wind meddling, ships luffing, stoving up as if careened; and I below.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson
After a second baking or perhaps stoving had taken place, the designs were further enriched by the application of opaque purple and white pigments, which follow certain conventional principles in their respective use.
From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 5, Slice 6 "Celtes, Konrad" to "Ceramics" by Various
Not a solitary germ, however, had survived the stoving and whitewashing, and the health record at the Dower House maintained its former standard of excellence.
From The School by the Sea by Angela Brazil
The operator should procure his enamels a shade or two lighter than he desires to see in the finished article, allowing the chemical action due to the stoving to tone the colours down.
From Handbook on Japanning: 2nd Edition For Ironware, Tinware, Wood, Etc. With Sections on Tinplating and Galvanizing by William N. Brown
The clothes she had worn disappeared mysteriously for some days, and were then returned from the stoving department of the Glenbury Sanitation Office.
From A harum-scarum schoolgirl by John Campbell
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
