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oven

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈʌ.vn̩//
  • United States//ˈʌv.ən//

A chamber used for baking or heating.

noun

  1. 1

    A chamber used for baking or heating.

    Baby I'm hot just like an oven / I need some lovin'

  2. 2

    figurativeA very hot place.

    The ballroom that evening was an absolute oven. I probably perspired more dancing then during the afternoon ballgame.

Etymology

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 (auhns, “oven”)), probably from a Proto-Indo-European *aukʷ- (“cooking pot”), *Hukʷ-, *ukʷnos (compare Sanskrit उखा (ukhā, “boiler, cauldron”), Albanian anë (“vessel, cooker”), Latin aulla, olla (“pot, jar”), Ancient Greek ἰπνός (ipnós, “oven, furnace”)). The modern pronunciation shows a sound change in which Middle English /ɔv/ is changed to /uv/; compare the phonetic development of Coventry and shovel.

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo cook in an oven.

    I'm gonna oven the pie for about 30 minutes, mate.

Forms

plural
ovens
past tense
ovened
past participle
ovened
present participle
ovening
third person singular
ovens
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).