An oven is a tool in the kitchen that gets very hot to cook food. People use it to bake bread, cakes, or roast meat. It heats from outside and cooks food inside it.
I put the pizza in the oven to bake.
The cake is in the oven now.
In factories, an oven is a large machine that uses heat to change materials. It can make metal hard or bake clay to make pottery. It works like a kitchen oven but much bigger and hotter.
The factory uses a big oven to harden metal parts.
Clay is baked in the ceramic oven at high heat.
An oven can mean the inside space where things are heated or baked in machines like kilns. This space gets hot to change or harden materials like clay or glass.
The oven temperature inside the kiln was very high.
Potters put their work inside the oven to fire it.
Before electric ovens, people used ovens made of bricks or stones. They made a fire inside to heat the walls and cook food. These ovens are often outside and still used for special cooking.
We baked bread in the wood-fired oven.
The old oven is made of bricks and uses wood.
Sometimes, 'oven' describes any very hot place, like a room or car that feels very warm. This meaning compares the heat to a cooking oven to show it is very hot.
The greenhouse felt like an oven in the summer sun.
My car gets like an oven on hot days.
People sometimes use 'oven' in a figurative way to say a place or situation is very hot or uncomfortable. This is common in informal speaking to describe heat strongly.
This party’s room is an oven, I need air.
The sun made the car like an oven today.
