To find a word with an unusual application, you don’t have to look any further than the kitchen. I”m not talking about “stove,” which is a word that originally meant a hot room like a steambath or sauna. That’s pretty close, though; a kitchen stove is also called (in the US) a “range.”
“Range” dates back to Old English, and it originally meant a group of hunters or soldiers. People engaged in soldiering or hunting (at least the way hunting was often conducted in the 1300s) are often deployed into some sort of regular formation of rows or “ranks,” which is another word from the same source.
By the 1400s “range” was being used for anything in a row, and it’s still used that way for “mountain range,” “range of options,” and the like. By the 1700s, people were getting interested in kitchen renovations: “We have occasion for larger Ranges, or Chimneys, and more ample Kitchins.”
The key feature of a kitchen cooker that makes it a “range” is multiple burners on the top, arranged in some sort of rows. The orderly arrangement of items has been associated with every usage of “range,” including one that’s disappeared; a neat, orderly person was once called “range:” “He, being a person exceedingly rangé in his ménage, got all his household accounts in, as usual after an absence from home” (1830). It’s not clear why the “e” was supposed to be pronounced as if it were a French import; this “range” is the same word, and its origins seem to be Germanic. But while “rangé” was in usé in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it seemed to always include the accent over the é. We’d still be doing it today if the word — in that context at least— hadn’t become as outré as accénts over an é. (Personally I think it’s mostly because it’s harder to do on a kéyboard.)
