Here are 3 examples:
Fried egg, fried rice, fried chicken

All these “fry” are different. If you were to use the “fry” in fried rice to fry an egg, you’d get scrambled egg. Fried chicken is done by submerging it in oil, which you won’t do with fried egg or fried rice.

This post is made from the perspective of a Cantonese/Chinese speaker. We have different words for these different types of “fry” (煎, 炒, 炸 respectively)

Edit: People here really don’t like it when a post talks about the English language.

Edit 2: I’m leaving Lemmy now. You happy?

Edit 3: wait I’m actually stupid and posted this on the wrong sub nvm

    • shackled@lemm.ee
      15·
      4 months ago

      That’s why we have modifiers. Pan fry (egg), stir fry (fried rice), and deep fry (chicken). There is even flash fry and now air fry.

      • FrankFrankson@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        4 months ago

        Yeah but pan and fry can be names. If you say “hey pan fry me an egg” you might be asking someone to pan fry you an egg or maybe you are specifically asking Pan to fry you an egg or maybe you are informing both Pan and Fry that you are an egg.

          • FrankFrankson@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            I was joking. I thought this was apparent by the last sentence but I guess I needed some /s action or something.

            Edit: also I put it in quotes so it would be like someone saying it out loud, left the commas out and didn’t capitalize anything to try and make it ambiguous like you would have to hear the person saying it to tell what they were saying.

        • tobogganablaze@lemmus.orgEnglish
          13·
          4 months ago

          You just need some common sense for that.

          An egg is essentially a liquid, so you can just pour it into the pan and it spreads out thin enough that it gets cooked all the way trough.

          Rice is made out of grains, so if you just pour them into the pan, the ones on the bottom will burn before the ones on the top gets cooked. So you have to stirr it to disperse the heat evenly.

          And chicken is a more bulky solid, so it needs to be submerged.