• (RP) IPA: /stəʊv/
• (America) IPA: /stoʊv/

From Middle Dutch stove and/or Middle Low German stove (compare Dutch stoof, nds-de Stuve, Stuuv), both from Proto-West Germanic *stubu, *stubō, from Proto-Germanic *stubō, further origin uncertain.

stove (plural stoves)

1. A heater, a closed apparatus to burn fuel for the warming of a room.
   • 1815 Robertson Buchanan, Appendix to A Treatise on the Economy of Fuel, and Management of Heat, Especially as it Relates to Heating and Drying by Means of Steam. p. 309. ↗

     [I]n the countries of modern Europe, the use of stoves prevail throughout the north; while in France and Great Britain, open fires are used. In the warm countries of Italy and Spain, there are very few chimneys, and the only method usually practised of tempering the cold... is to burn charcoal in portable brasiers.

   • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y., London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC ↗:

     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.

2. A device for heating food, (UK) a cooker.
3. A stovetop, with hotplates.
4. (chiefly, UK) A hothouse heated greenhouse.
   • 1850, M. A. Burnett, Plantae utiliores: or illustrations of useful plants, employed in the arts and medicine, part 8:

     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.

5. (dated) A house or room artificially warmed or heated.
   • April 1, 1634, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, letter to the Lord Deputy

     When most of the waiters were commanded away to their supper, the Parlour or Stove being near emptied, in came a Company of Musketeers.

   • 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC ↗:

     How tedious is it to them that live in stoves and caves half a year together, as in Iceland, Muscovy, or under the pole!

• French: poêle
• German: Ofen
• Italian: stufa
• Portuguese: aquecedor, fogão
• Russian: печь
• Spanish: estufa, calentador

• French: fourneau, cuisinière
• German: Herd, Kochherd
• Italian: fornello
• Portuguese: fogão
• Russian: плита́
• Spanish: cocina, estufa, hornillo, calentador

stove (stoves, present participle stoving; simple past and past participle stoved)

1. (transitive) To heat or dry, as in a stove.

   to stove feathers

   • 1975, William Geoffrey Potter, Uses of Epoxy Resins, page 39:

     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.

2. (transitive) To keep warm, in a house or room, by artificial heat.

   to stove orange trees

   • 1625, Francis [Bacon], “Of Gardens”, in The Essayes […], 3rd edition, London: […] Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, →OCLC ↗:

     orange-trees , lemon-trees , and myrtles , if they be stoved

1. Simple past tense and past participle of stave#Verb
   • 1851 November 13, Herman Melville, chapter 7, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC ↗:

     [A]ye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.

   • 1851 November 13, Herman Melville, chapter 36, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC ↗:

     "A dead whale or a stove boat!"