When I googled ”レンジでチン,” I got nearly 5 million hits. It is a very common expression in Japanese.
What does that mean? If someone asks you to レンジでチンして as a request, what are you supposed to do?
レンジ comes from the English word “range” for “a cooking stove” but the Katakana レンジ is usually used as a shortened form of 電子(でんし)レンジ which is the Japanese word for a microwave oven.
チン is an onomatopoeia for a tinkling sound – the sound some (older) microwave ovens make at the end of their heating cycle.
So レンジでチンする or its shortened form チンする means to heat something up in a microwave.
Next time you get a luke warm coffee, you can say: レンジでチンして!
Make sure you say チン only once, because if you say it twice in a row, that refers to a body part only boys/men have!
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