Word.ws English Dictionary

cooked the books

cooked the books is the simple past and past participle of cook the books.

Meaning of cook the books

Verb

cook the books (third-person singular simple present cooks the books, present participle cooking the books, simple past and past participle cooked the books)

  1. (idiomatic) To manipulate accounting information, especially illegally.
    • Enron Corp., once a major U.S. corporation, is now famous for cooking the books.
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) To falsify an account of an event.
    • Those that cooked the books and presented them with bias minds; They sugar-coated the stories; and twisted and exaggerated events2012, R.I. Iyemere, The Ordeals: Poems in Memory of Ada-Emilia Valmori, →ISBN, page 146

Questions about cooked the books

What is cooked the books the simple past and past participle of?
Cooked the books is the simple past and past participle of cook the books.

Words near cooked the books in the dictionary

  1. cooked back
  2. cooked mode
  3. cooked off
  4. cooked out
  5. cooked someone's goose
  6. cooked the books
  7. cooked through
  8. cooked up
  9. cooked up a storm
  10. cookedness
  11. cookee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cooked the books (page history and authors); cook the books (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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