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)
Which action you would need to do to achieve cooking the food in the way you want
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.