During many of our lessons we’ve encountered some problems with distinguishing the meanings between some expressions. This time we’d like to focus on the cooking area.

Let’s take four expressions connected to that domain and pair them up:
cook vs. cooker – the most common mistake made by English learners
cook vs. chef – a difference in semantics
chef vs. chief – quite common mistake, despite very different meanings

Dear Learners, please remember that a cook is a person who cooks the meals using for that purpose a special household appliance, which is a cooker. So, as you see, one is a person and the other’s a thing.

We’ve also mentioned a pair of two expressions that basically seem to mean the same thing, however there’s a slight, or for some, a great semantic difference – cook and chef.
Both of the expressions refer to people who cook. However, chef is usually the person who’s in charge of all the cooks of the given restaurant, or a group of cooks (e.g. sous chef) and has received a culinary education. For further information on that topic, you may be interested in reading:
https://www.reluctantgourmet.com/difference-cook-chef/
or
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/…/chef-vs-cook-is-there-a-diff….

And we’re left with the last pair of words that sometimes create some confusion, i.e. chef and chief. So, the word chef has already been explained above and we may focus on chief.
Chief means usually a leader of a group (e.g. chief of police/fire brigade, etc.) or may be used to address somebody who’s equal to us or is in charge, as in 'Hey, chief!’ or 'Waytago, Chief!’.

We hope that our post clears up some of your doubts :).