cooked

1. 1
   adjective

   Made ready to eat by applying heat, such as boiling, frying, roasting, or baking.

   A plate of cooked vegetables sat steaming on the counter.

   The recipe calls for cooked lentils rather than dried ones.

   Oppositeraw, uncooked, unprepared

   Note

   The adjective is the verb's past participle put to work before a noun, so cooked lentils and lentils that have been cooked mean the same thing. Its natural opposites are raw and uncooked. Nearly every slang meaning of the word starts here, borrowing the picture of something heated until it is thoroughly done.

2. 2
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of cook.

   He cooked a stew that simmered all afternoon.

   The vegetables were cooked until they turned tender.

   Note

   A regular past form, and the verb runs both ways: you can cook a stew, or the stew simply cooked for hours. In passive sentences it shades into the adjective for prepared food, since the vegetables were cooked can describe an action or a state. Slang uses of the verb run through this form too: electronics cooked by excessive heat, or, darkly, a convict executed in the electric chair.

3. 3
   adjectiveslangnot before a noun

   Facing a hopeless situation with no realistic way to escape failure or defeat.

   Like a chess player staring at checkmate with no legal move left.

   With two minutes left and no timeouts, the team was completely cooked.

   The moment the auditors found the missing files, the company was cooked.

   Similardoomed, finished, done

   Note

   Usually predicative: people and teams are cooked, and the word rarely stands before a noun. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) repeats it like a refrain ("We were all cooked") and political reporting in 2016 still says a candidate "was cooked in Iowa." It works as a softer stand-in for fucked in the same sense, final-sounding but printable.

4. 4
   adjectiveslang

   Completely worn out and drained of physical or mental energy.

   Like an engine pushed flat-out until it has nothing left to give.

   By the final mile of the marathon, his legs were cooked.

   After back-to-back night shifts, the nurses were cooked.

   Similarexhausted, spent, drained, shattered, beat

   Oppositefresh, energetic, rested

   Note

   Slang for a body or mind with nothing left: legs, brains and whole night shifts get cooked. Keep it apart from the "doomed" meaning: a cooked runner is spent but may still finish, while a cooked team has already lost. Context usually settles which is meant, though in casual talk the two can blur.

5. 5
   adjective

   Partly or wholly made up or falsified rather than genuine.

   Like a photo edited to show something that never actually happened.

   Investigators found that the financial figures had been cooked.

   The dossier was largely cooked, padded with invented sources.

   Similarfalsified, doctored, fabricated, rigged, fake

   Oppositegenuine, authentic, accurate

   Note

   Figures are the classic thing to be cooked, whether in accounts or in intelligence. In 1925 a speaker in the House of Lords, reported in The Accountant, felt the need to apologize for the word: the figures had been "cooked," if I may use such an expression. Calling figures cooked implies someone deliberately doctored them, not that they are merely mistaken.

6. 6
   adjectiveslangAustralia

   Intoxicated: drunk, high, or stoned from alcohol or drugs.

   After the third round of shots, she was thoroughly cooked.

   They showed up to the concert already cooked.

   Similarintoxicated, baked, toasted

   Oppositesober

   Note

   Mostly Australian slang, and indifferent to the cause: cooked covers drink and drugs alike. It belongs to a family of heat words for intoxication, alongside baked and toasted, and baked follows it into darker territory too: the hangover, lasting drug damage, and craziness. What matters is the state, not the substance.

7. 7
   adjective

   Suffering the headache, nausea, and fatigue that follow a night of heavy drinking.

   Nursing a pounding head, he was clearly cooked after the wedding.

   The whole crew turned up cooked after the New Year's celebrations.

   Similarhungover

8. 8
   adjective

   Permanently impaired in mental function as a lasting result of drug use.

   After a decade of abuse, his memory was shot and his friends called him cooked.

   The clinic treats addicts who are partly cooked from long-term use.

   Similarfried

9. 9
   adjectiveslangderogatoryfigurativelyAustralia

   Crazy or mentally unhinged, judged by wildly irrational behavior.

   Anyone who drives in this weather for fun is completely cooked.

   His coworkers thought he was cooked for quitting a safe job to chase rainbows.

   Similarcrazy, insane, demented, deranged, bonkers

   Oppositesane, rational, sensible

   Note

   This is a chiefly Australian, derogatory jab at someone's judgment: a person who quits a safe job on a whim is cooked. Keep it for choices and behavior among friends; aimed at someone with real mental illness it becomes offensive. It shares its heat imagery with the drunk-or-high meaning, and context has to separate the two.

10. 10
    adjectiveslang

    Of audio data: corrupted by conversion through a text format, so that it must be 'uncooked' before it will play properly.

    The samples were cooked by passing them through the text encoder, so nobody could play them.

    He had to uncook the cooked clips before playback worked at all.

    Note

    MP3 files around the turn of the century could be mangled when a server sent them as text instead of as binary data, and the damage was called cooking. Michael Miller's Special Edition Using the Internet (2001) describes the result as "gurgly" playback. The fix had its own verb, uncook, and the pair travel together: a cooked file is one waiting to be uncooked.

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