Definition
nounA heater, a closed apparatus to burn fuel for the warming of a room.
nounA device for heating food, (UK) a cooker.
Sentence Examples
Anticipating a cold winter, we bought a bigger stove.
A plastic dish will melt on the stove.
Word Origin & History
From Middle Dutch stove and/or Middle Low German stove (compare Dutch stoof (“foot stove”), German Low German Stuve, Stuuv), both from Proto-West Germanic *stubu (“heated room, bathroom, stove”), further origin uncertain. The Germanic words are very old, and are the source of the Slavic and Romance terms. It is often speculated that the Germanic terms were borrowed from Vulgar Latin *extūfa, *extūfāre (“to heat with steam”), from Latin ex- + *tūfus (“hot vapor”), from Ancient Greek τῦφος (tûphos, “fever”).
Cognates
Cognate with Old English stofa (“bathroom, bathhouse”), stufbæþ (“hot-air bath”), Old High German stuba (“heated room, bathroom”) (whence German Stube (“living room, room, parlour”), Hungarian szoba (“room”)), Old Norse stofa (whence Danish stue (“living room, room”), Faroese stova (“living room, house”), Icelandic stofa (“living room”), Norwegian Bokmål stue (“cottage, cabin, living room”), Norwegian Nynorsk stove (“cottage, cabin, living room”), Swedish stuga (“cottage, cabin, living room”)).
Doublet of stufa.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"We toted in the wood and got the fire going nice and comfortable. Lord James still set in one of the chairs and Applegate had cabbaged the other and was hugging the stove."
— 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
"There existed only one specimen of this sacred tree in all Mexico, at least to the knowledge of the Mexicans; […] In spite, however, of the firmest convictions of the indivisibility of this tree — the Manitas, as it is commonly called — it has been propagated by cuttings, some of which are at this moment thriving in some of the larger stoves of our modern collectors."
— 1850, M. A. Burnett, Plantae utiliores: or illustrations of useful plants, employed in the arts and medicine, part 8:
"Let but these facts lie contrasted with the treatment they usually receive in the stoves of this country, and the reason why they never grow to any considerable size, attain to any degree of perfection, or flourish to any extent […]"
— 1854, The Horticultural Review and Botanical Magazine, volume 4, page 208:
"How tedious is it to them that live in stoves and caves half a year together, as in Iceland, Muscovy, or under the pole!"
— 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC:
"The wide use of amine-cured epoxy paints is mostly due to their providing many of the properties of stoved epoxy films from an ambient temperature-cured system."
— 1975, William Geoffrey Potter, Uses of Epoxy Resins, page 39: