An oven is an enclosed heated space used for cooking food. Think of it as a box that gets hot inside, where you can bake cookies, roast a chicken, or warm up a frozen pizza. The heat surrounds the food from all sides, cooking it evenly.

Ovens work differently than stovetops, where heat comes just from below. In an oven, you can set a specific temperature, and the enclosed space maintains that heat. This makes ovens perfect for baking cakes (which need steady, even heat) or roasting vegetables (which need time to caramelize and soften).

Most modern ovens are part of a kitchen range, with burners on top and the oven below. You control the temperature with dials or buttons, and a thermostat keeps the inside at the right heat. Before electric and gas ovens, people cooked in wood-fired ovens or brick ovens, which required much more skill to maintain the right temperature.

The word oven can also describe any enclosed space that gets very hot. On a blazing summer day, you might complain that your bedroom feels like an oven. A pottery kiln is essentially a specialized oven for hardening clay at extremely high temperatures.