Other forms: hottest, hotter
Hot is what you say about a high temperature: the pavement in August, a radiator in February, tea straight from the kettle. Careful, the plate is hot.
Hot has a second everyday job in food, where it means spicy. A hot curry can be stone cold on the plate and still burn your mouth, and that double meaning catches learners out constantly. It also means in demand or exciting: a hot topic, a hot new restaurant, hot property. Used of a person, hot means sexually attractive, and it is casual enough that you would not put it in anything written for work. Then come the phrases: in hot water is in trouble, hot on the heels of means right behind, hot air is talk with nothing inside it, and to blow hot and cold is to keep changing your mind. The comparative doubles the t: hotter, hottest.
1adjectivehotHaving a high temperature.~84%
“The sand was too hot to walk on without shoes.”
2adjectivecontainingContaining spices that burn the mouth.~7%
“Ask for the mild one, because their hot sauce is serious.”
3adjectivepopularPopular, exciting and in demand at this moment.~7%
“Housing is the hot topic in every meeting this month.”
4adjectivesexuallySexually attractive. Informal.~2%
“He thinks the new neighbour is hot.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 15 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English hāt meant hot, and the word has barely shifted in a thousand years. It runs back through Proto-Germanic *haitaz to a Proto-Indo-European root *keHy-, to heat or to become hot. Dutch heet, German heiß, Swedish het and Icelandic heitur are all the same word in different mouths. Heat is its close relative, which is why the two look so alike.
Middle English
hot
English, today
hot
From Middle English hot. From Middle English hot, hoot, from Old English hāt (“hot”), from Proto-West Germanic hait, from Proto-Germanic haitaz (“hot”), from Proto-Indo-European keHy- (“to heat; to become hot”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA