cooking-with-gas
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
16 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "cooking-with-gas", 16-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "cooking-with-gas" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "cooking-with-gas" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cooking with gas is aEnglishphrase. It means: Functioning particularly effectively; achieving something substantial.
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See how cooking with gas compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cooking with gas |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Phrase |
| Letters | 16 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cooking with gas is 16 letters long, classified as aphrase. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for cooking with gas in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: To cook with natural gas fuel has been occurring since at least the 19th century when the petroleum industry came into being and new products and markets were developed. The idiomatic phrase entered the popular lexicon as part of an advertising slogan in la… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is cooking with gas, spelled C-O-O-K-I-N-G- -W-I-T-H- -G-A-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Functioning particularly effectively; achieving something substantial.
- 2Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see cook, with, gas.
Etymology
To cook with natural gas fuel has been occurring since at least the 19th century when the petroleum industry came into being and new products and markets were developed. The idiomatic phrase entered the popular lexicon as part of an advertising slogan in late 1930s or early 1940s, for American Gas Association. The slogan "Now you're cooking with gas!" was coined by Deke Houlgate, an employee of AGA, who worked with Bob Hope to insert the phrase into his comedy routines as subtle product placement. The initial idea was to compete with the increasing popularity of electric stoves in the 1930s. However by 1940 it came to have a broader idiomatic usage and figurative meaning because of the way it was used by Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and even a Daffy Duck cartoon, eclipsing its original intent as advertising. The slogan was repeated throughout the 1941-1942 radio season by many radio stars. Also used by jazz musicians to praise a performance.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: