Why is a kitchen stove sometimes called a range?

Question

Range to me seems like something livestock grazes on. Any ideas???

Answer 1

I would guess because a stove has spaces for cooking a number of things at the same time. Range of cooking?!

Scott

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Answer 2

Because that's where you keep the deer and the antelope, of course. :-)

Apparently the idea that you can put more than one pot on it to cook means you have a range (an arrangement, as it were). This use of the word goes back at least to Elizabethan English (as in Shakespeare's day). At that time even a fireplace that held more than one oven was a range. (That's how the word is used in the King James translation of the Bible, Lev 11:35.)

Today the word implies a flat cooking top with an oven underneath, according to most dictionaries: a very particular arrangement.