Rare means not happening or found very often. It can also describe meat that is only lightly cooked, so it is still red or pink inside.
It comes from Old French “rer” or “rar,” from Latin “rarus,” meaning “loose, thin, scattered, uncommon.” The cooking sense developed later, possibly from the idea of something not fully dense or solid.
“Rare” and “raw” are distant cousins in meaning when we talk about meat, but “rare” originally had nothing to do with cooking. The core idea is about things being spread out or scarce, which is why a “rare event” is one that’s thinly scattered in time.
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