stove

Etymology

It is borrowed from Middle Low German stove or Middle Dutch stove, both meaning a heated room;^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]} the Middle Dutch word also meant a foot-warmer, and is modern Dutch stoof.^[4][8][6] stofa, a hot-air bath, is found once in Old English, glossing Latin balneum, with the related stuf-bæð, but the OED and Etymonline think it did not survive and that the word was taken up afresh from Low German or Dutch in the 15th century;^[3][2] Skeat, Klein and Partridge instead derived the English word from Old English, Partridge with strong influence from Middle Dutch.^[9][10][11] It is a widespread Germanic word: Old High German stuba (“heated room”), whence German Stube (“sitting room”), and Old Norse stofa, whence Swedish stuga (“cottage”) and Danish stue (“room”), which the OED thinks were taken from Low German.^[3][4][2] Its relation to the Romance words, Italian stufa, Old French estuve (now étuve (“steam room”)) and Spanish estufa (“stove”), is uncertain.^[3][2][4] Etymonline and Ayto mention a theory that traces them all to Vulgar Latin *extūfō (“to take a steam bath”), the source of stew,^[2][12][7] and Barnhart reports that Schuchardt took the Romance words to be native and the Germanic ones as borrowed from them.^[4] The Germanic word in turn passed into other languages, such as Polish izba (“room”), Latvian istaba, Hungarian szoba and Finnish tupa.^[12][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

A heated room, especially a hot-air bath or sweating-room: 1456, in G. Hay's Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis.^[3][4][2]

Semantic evolution

Trench noted that the word, probably brought from Holland, had much narrowed its meaning: any bath, hothouse or room heated by artificial means was once a stove.^[13] From the sweating-room it came to mean a sitting-room or bedroom heated by a furnace, mostly in accounts of Germany, the Low Countries, Scandinavia or Russia (1542–1706), and a hothouse for plants (1697).^[3][8] The apparatus that heated such a room, a closed box burning fuel, is dated 1604 by the OED, the 1610s by Etymonline and before 1618 by Barnhart;^[3][2][4] the OED notes that it first meant the heater of a stove in the older sense.^[3] Ayto points out that the Romance words took the same course, from "heated room" to "oven, cooker", while German Stube and Danish stue lost the idea of heat and kept "room".^[12] Johnson (1755) still defined it first as a hothouse, a place artificially warmed.^[14] The verb, recorded with the noun in 1456, meant to put someone in a hot-air bath; later it meant to keep plants in a hothouse (1625), to dry something in a heated chamber (before 1625), to stew meat, now in Scotland and the North (1736), and to fumigate with sulphur (1805).^[3][15]

Timeline

• 1456 – a hot-air bath or sweating-room; verb, to put in such a bath.^[3][4]
• 1542 – a room heated by a furnace (obsolete by 1706).^[3]
• 1604 – a closed apparatus burning fuel to give heat.^[3]
• 1625 – verb, to keep plants in a hothouse.^[3]
• 1640 – a heated chamber or box for a special purpose.^[3]
• 1697 – a hothouse for plants.^[3]
• 1716 – a foot-warmer holding burning charcoal.^[3]
• 1736 – verb, to stew meat or vegetables.^[3]
• 1805 – verb, to fumigate with sulphur.^[3]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. An apparatus for cooking, with burners or hotplates on top and usually an oven; a cooker.
2. An apparatus that burns fuel or uses electricity to heat a room.
3. A heated chamber for a special purpose, such as a kiln.
4. (chiefly British) A hothouse for plants.

Verb

1. To treat ceramics or metalwork by heating them in a stove.
2. (Scotland) To stew meat or vegetables.

Word family

• cookstove
• stovepipe
• woodstove
• camp stove
• Franklin stove
• potbellied stove
• potbelly stove
• Primus stove

Related words

• stew
• stave

Usage notes

Stove is also a past tense and past participle of stave, used especially of a boat's planks broken in (stove in, 1850 in Melville);^[3][6][5] Weekley called the nautical present to stove an incorrect use of it.^[16] Stove-up, worn out, is North American slang from the early 20th century.^[6][3] In Scots and northern English, stove was also a mist or vapour rising from the ground.^[3][17]

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b c d Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
11. ^ Partridge, Eric (1966), Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
12. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
13. ^ Trench, Richard Chenevix (1859), A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from Their Present, London: John W. Parker
14. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
15. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
16. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
17. ^ Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898–1905), The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., Oxford: Henry Frowde; via EDD Online 4.0, University of Innsbruck (CC BY 4.0)