stove

Pluralstoves

Formsstoves, stoving, stoved

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A kitchen appliance used for cooking or heating food.

   He left a pan simmering on the stove while he chopped vegetables.

   Modern stoves often combine electric burners with a built-in oven.

   Similarrange, cooker

   Note

   Kitchen vocabulary divides here. Where British speakers would usually call the whole appliance a cooker, stove does that job in other varieties of English. The preposition often shows which stove is meant: food is on the stove, while people huddle around the stove for warmth. For the burner surface alone, see the stovetop meaning.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The upper cooking surface of a kitchen appliance, fitted with hotplates or burners.

   He set the skillet on the stove and turned up the heat under it.

   Spilled milk crusted onto the stove between the burners.

   Similarcooktop, hob

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A closed apparatus that burns fuel to heat a room.

   They huddled around the stove as snow piled against the cabin door.

   He fed another log into the stove to keep the room warm.

   Similarheater, furnace, burner

   Note

   The apparatus took its name from the room it warmed. Middle Dutch or Middle Low German stove goes back to Proto-Germanic *stubō, "room, heated room", and that older meaning survives in the dated 'heated room' sense. Robertson Buchanan wrote in 1815 that the use of stoves prevailed across modern Europe. By 1913, Joseph C. Lincoln's characters are simply hugging the stove, crowding as close to its warmth as they can.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To heat or dry something in or as if in a stove.

   Potters stove their wares to drive off the last moisture.

   The workshop stoves freshly cast parts before painting them.

   Similardry, bake, cure, fire, heat

   Note

   Industrial coatings keep this verb in use. A stoved finish is paint or enamel cured by heat, and William Geoffrey Potter's Uses of Epoxy Resins (1975) contrasts stoved epoxy films with ones cured at ambient temperature. The older pattern applies it to drying materials, as in to stove feathers. Its forms are regular (stoving, stoved), unlike the past form of stave.

5. 5
   nounUKcountable

   A heated greenhouse for growing plants that require warmth.

   The head gardener tended rare ferns in the stove behind the manor.

   Exotic fruits ripened in the stove long after the first frosts.

   Similarhothouse, greenhouse, glasshouse

   Note

   A gardener's use, chiefly British and at home in nineteenth-century horticultural writing. In 1854, The Horticultural Review and Botanical Magazine blamed "the stoves of this country" for tropical plants that never grow to any considerable size. Outside a garden setting, a modern reader will picture the kitchen appliance, so hothouse is the safer word unless the context makes the sense plain.

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To keep a house or room warm by artificial heat.

   The staff stove the upper rooms whenever guests stayed over.

   Caretakers stove the chapel before each Sunday service.

   Similarheat, warm

   Oppositecool, chill

   Note

   Gardeners did this to tender trees. In his essay "Of Gardens" (1625), Francis Bacon allows orange-trees, lemon-trees and myrtles "if they be stoved", meaning wintered under artificial heat. The object of the verb is usually the thing being protected rather than the room itself. That ties it closely to the heated greenhouse.

7. 7
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of stave.

   The storm stove in several planks along the ship's side.

   Years of waves had stove in the abandoned dinghy.

   Note

   This stove has nothing to do with heat. It is a past form of stave, from that verb's "break a hole in" meaning, and it most often travels with in, as in Stan Rogers's "Barrett's Privateers" (1981), where an American ship does this to the narrator's vessel. As a participle it also serves as an adjective. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), the whalers' cry is "A dead whale or a stove boat!"

8. 8
   verbtransitive

   To injure by jamming or spraining, as a finger or toe.

   Basketball players frequently stove their fingers blocking shots.

   He tends to stove a toe whenever he walks barefoot.

   Similarjam, stub, sprain

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